Treatment of Minor Varieties and Errors

When you first start examining coins with a magnifying glass it will open up a world filled with what appears to be irregularities that you will think, “just have to be valuable errors and varieties!” At first you may feel it’s “beginner’s luck” and you’ve magically struck a gold mine! Valuable coins that nobody before you seemed lucky enough to encounter, are yours for the taking! Almost every handful of coins you check turns up significant numbers of “valuable” errors! You start to envision trips to the Virgin Islands or a new boat docked out in front of your new condo on the lake. Some of these “errors” may in fact be legitimate, but others will be imagined – like angels in the clouds. Still others will represent little more than reflections or shadows that you just haven’t become accustomed to recognizing.

At about the point you’ve stacked up your first fortune, it’s time for a reality check. The fact is, valuable error coins are not found in circulation in short periods of time in quantities measured in stacks. It’s a lot like fishing. The first few times out you may catch a lot of snags and/or wander over to a “nursery area” and catch a bunch of small fry! Generally speaking, the big fish just aren’t going to jump into the boat and it’s going to take a bit of time, practice, and experience to start consistently catching the big ones.

In the beginning, you are most likely to find large numbers of minor variations such as die cracks, die chips, die scratches, plating blisters, die flow lines, missing or weak design elements due to die abrasion, die deterioration doubling, double rims, and minor clash marks. These are very common on most issues of world coins and are not necessarily anything out of the ordinary.

Traditionally, these types of variations hold very little monetary value over face value. Yes, a collector or dealer may run an ad and sell a few at an inflated price to unknowledgeable collectors, but the fact is there is not a single dealer involved in the error-variety hobby that will purchase such items for resale, and few (if any) of today’s sellers will be willing buyers of these items tomorrow. Are these varieties interesting? Yes! And they are very collectible too! They are also of extremely high educational value. The area of die chips, cracks, etc., is where many of the old-time-error-variety collectors started out . . . and there is a lot to be learned about dies and the minting process by studying such items. Valuable? Well, if you can’t find an error-variety dealer that will buy them, much less handle them, then you must conclude that they are of little value over face. We suggest you have fun searching and keep as many as you like as long as you’re not paying over face value. Just realize you’re collecting them for fun and education and that no resale market to dealers exists.

It should be noted that there is always an exception to the rule! Exceptions include coins like the 1922 No D cent, the 1937-D 3 Legged Buffalo nickel and the 1982 “No FG” Kennedy halves. All exhibit very trivial flaws of a class normally ignored by collectors that have been promoted into high demand “major errors.”

While 99.9 percent of the “minors” are ignored by the majority of collectors and dealers, you just never know which will be the next to catch on. It probably wouldn’t hurt to hold on to a few of the more interesting ones to see what happens.

States quarters with interesting die breaks.

While the vast majority of minor errors described in this chapter carry no premium, a few do carry modest premiums of 50¢ to $5. Lincoln cents with a die break between the B and E of LIBERTY (referred to as BIE cents), interesting die breaks on states quarters, and clashed dies are a few examples of minor varieties which carry slight value.