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Originally Posted by NeillC I can see how you could distinguish errors from varieties using your criteria but rotated dies must present a problem. If the dies are installed incorrectly they may strike 50,000 coins or more the same way. If the dies slip (they are keyed) then presumably you could get a batch of coins with differing rotations. |
This is true, and as mentioned above, the line can be pretty fine separating the two. There was a famous 1967 Canada Dollar, a Diving Goose they called it. It had a die rotation and it caught on with collectors, so it is variety of sorts.
In my mind, though, in general rotated dies are errors, not varieties, since a die rotation is more undefined - I mean, it could be one coin or a hundred thousand coins, and there can be as many die rotations as there are die installations. Plus, and this is the key point for me, whereas a die variety is static (set in place and repeated exactly each time), you could argue that scientifically speaking, no two die installations will produce EXACTLY the same die alignment. They might differ by one billionth of an inch, but they are all “different” (this goes back to my high school science days when I was told that no two things are truly identical, since you can drill down to ever-deeper examinations until you find some sub-microscopic difference).
A three legged Buffalo nickel or even an extra leaf on a Wisconsin quarter are obvious and stand out from other coins, but there could be thousands of different die rotations (some the same but not made from the same set of dies) of some degree, no matter how small.
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