I'm on a mission right now, searching through a jar of about 2,000 pennies. I have been keeping my eyes out for things like: double ears, wide-AM, wheats, and S-mints. My biggest problem is wide-AM coins though. I don't know how to tell if a penny has wide-AM or not. The A and the M are supposed to be more stretched out. I have looked at many examples of photographs of wide-AMs on the internet, but for some reason I can't find the difference between those and normal pennies. Sadly they all look the same to me. Any tips?
The "wide" refers to the space between the characters, not the characters themselves. The difference in spacing in these two photos is pretty striking IMHO.
I had some troublw with this as well. Those pictures that satootoko posted however were excellent and clear! Nice job. Peter
Oops. :| I thought wide-AM referred to wide characters, not wide spacing. I know for a fact I have found a few of the wide-AM ones but I tossed them out thinking the characters were wide not the spacing. Argh, now I have some wide-AM's in my huge jar of like 3,000 pennies. Unless wide-AMs are worth searching through 3k pennies, I don't think I'm going to go looking for them again. Will keep my eye out when searching rolls though. Thank you guys, Very helpful; Andrew
It depends on the year as to whether it's worth looking for. The 1999 seems to be the most rare followed by the 1998, whereas the 2000 wide AM is fairly common and the value is thus fairly low.
I agree about the great photos that explain it well. However, as a person gets older and the eyes get weaker, even that spacing becomes difficult. I too used to buy bags of coins and go through them. Now at a fairly older age I'll just go to a coin show and buy one with a wide or close anything. I've learned it may cost more but sure is easier on the eyes.
