I imagine that mint mark errors now (rpms, touching, d over s, s over d, horizontals, and otherwise just flat out missing) are now a thing of the past since they aren't done by had anymore? I found this coin and it got me wondering, exactly when did they stop punching mint marks by hand? Was it before or after this one?...
I believe that would be before 1989. And.. RPM's and D over S are Varieties. Here is the difference... https://www.ngccoin.com/news/article/1655/Variety-versus-Mint-Error/ I thought You would know this by now?
Back in my day, you know the days of type writers and such, those kind of things used to be called "typo"s. Whenever you made a mistake typing, you would then "type over" your mistake (aka an error). And when that error got "xerox"ed and sent out to a million people, that would be called a BIG MISTAKE.... only in the coin world does it become a variety.
I think they have to be "big mistakes" in order to qualify. When there's only one of them they call that an error, cuz well there's only one of them so not too much to collect there. If they make a whole bunch of copies it's a variety. Pretty much any error on a die is a variety, and any error on the coin, not made by the die is just and error coin. Does that sound about right?
It just occured to me that RPMs might not be typos after all. It could be very well be done on purpose. Years when there aren't many dies and they have alot of coins to mint, the polishing of the dies would probably widdle down the mint mint first, so they'd re-punch it. It would explain why one of the coins I have has like 4 punches.... maybe, I wonder if they mint keeps a record of that sort of thing?
