A while back I was able to get a few old books from the 70s and earlier relating to different aspects of numismatics. 1 of them was this "Variety and Oddity" guide from 1977 by a Frank Spadone. Flipping through it I couldnt help notice how far things have come from the definitions and descriptions used in 1977. Even the coins they listed. I have 2 1958 D LWCs with anomalies connecting the date, mm, bust which I couldnt believe were actually listed in this book!!!!! So it made me wonder. How did the E&V (error and variety) side of coin collecting get to where it is now? Who changed Micro double shift to Machine doubling, Double mint mark to Rpm or Double die shift to Doubled die? And was the information at all accurate? For example might a 1956 D seperated mint mark RPM be listed as a die break? That kinda stuff. I know we're talking 45 years here but I thought it was interesting. So any old timers out there who could paint a picture on how E&V collecting evolved and who impacted it the most? Thanks!!!!
I started collecting in '76, but not with errors, sorry. I had a book like that lying around here somewhere recently. It was fun to look at.
I am going to focus simply on the "double die shift" term you alluded to. As early as 1969 (13th Edition), Yeoman was using the term Dbl Die in the Red Book. Now, this could had meant "Double Die shift", but I would contend that it had probably stood for "Doubled Die". Alan Herbert's 1974 book The Official Guide to Mint Errors identifies these errors as "Doubled Die". I have Spadone's 4th Edition from 1967 and he certainly uses "Double Die Shift". Now, if Spadone uses the same term in the 1977 edition, then I would contend that "Doubled Die" and "Double Die Shift" may have grown up together just as EF and XF and is simply a matter of preference. That is, if anyone else other than Spadone utilized that term. At least by the fifth edition of The Green Coin Book in 1966, Friedberg was using the term "Double Die" which continued through the 1996 edition of the catalog. The 1973 edition of The Official Black Book also utilized the same term. This same term is echoed in the 1971 Krause. Getting desperate to find anything that exactly agrees with Spadone, I have moved on to some more obscure sources. Coin Collectors Digest Vol. 1 No. V (February 1965) references the Lincoln 1955DDO as a "Double Strike". Yeah...obscure reference...we'll ignore those next time. Taking a plunge, I checked the index to The Numismatic Scrapbook for 1955 to see what they may have termed the discovery of the 1955DDO (since I found one dealer term it simply as a 1955/1955 in the 1960 volume of said magazine). Lo and behold! In the January edition, there is an article about Mercury dimes. The title of the article is "Double Die" Dimes, however, throughout the article the term "doubled die" is used. At this point, I would contend that Spadone may have been trying to change a well rooted term to his own liking. I cannot seem to find any reference to the use of "double die shift" anywhere else. However, I have hardly exhausted the sources available to research the issue.
Probably until the early 1970s most collectors probably had no good idea exactly how coins were made and what the processes were. Collecting errors and/or varieties was not a popular part of the hobby and most people weren't interested in learning about them. Hence the common name for such coins was FIDO's Freaks Irregular Defective Oddities. So when an error was described no standard terms were used. Back in 1929 when Beistle was describing half dollar varieties he would find that some examples of a variety would have certain marks on them and he knew it wasn't something that happened in circulation because he would hve multiple examples with the same marks. He called them Acki-defects. In the early 60's coins with such marks were called "Suction Marks" and the explanation was that the "incredible suction created when the coin came off the die sucked the design features of the other side right through the coin. Today we call them die clash marks. It was just a matter of learning more and more about the actual minting process which has allowed us to refine the terms over the years to increase their precision. Some of the early pioneers in the field in the 60's and 70s were Mort Reed, Arnold Margolis, and Lonesome John Divine. As much as we laugh at Frank Spadone today over his book, it was one of the first books to try to catalog known errors and varieties, and though we know today that much of what he had in there was wrong, and he was fooled by a some coins that were just damaged, he was a pioneer who was trying to figure it out as he went along.
Here is a thread I did back in March 2015.. with a lot of opinions on Mr. Spadone https://www.cointalk.com/threads/19...us-coins-my-first-source.261195/#post-2108676
Very interesting thread! I was a rabid collector from around 1970 until 1991 and took a break while I raised a family. Came back to the hobby full on maybe ten years ago. Two areas of collecting just floored me. The advent of TPG's and the popularity of error collecting. I often watch the error thread just to learn. But I would surmise that error collecting has outpaced old fashioned collecting during my absence. I'll be watching this thread as it goes along. Great topic.
A large part of that is the fact that with the super high mintages of all the recent coinage, nearly 60 years since the end of silver, and with the exception of the quarters almost no significant design changes in the memory of the average new collector, their parents or even their grandparents, the chance of finding anything rare or a key or semi-key date in circulation is pretty much zero. This leaves pretty much the ONLY thing "good" they have a chance of finding in change or roll hunting are errors and/or varieties. If that is all you can find, that's what you concentrate on. The best thing that has come along for the "regular" collector has been the W mint quarters. But since they were announce ahead of time, and we know ahead of time when each new design is coming out, most of the W quarters get immediately stripped out of the boxes and never make it to circulation, reducing that to slim pickings as well.
You make a great point and it would have been terrific if the mint had said nothing about them and simply released them, allowing the collecting community to discover them circulating. If I remember correctly, isn't that how they handled the "P" mint-marked Lincolns released a few years ago?
I don't believe so, but since ALL of the 2017 Philadelphia cents had the P mintmark people would have had to hoard over 2 billion coins. So they did end up circulating. At least I suppose they did. I've still only seen one of them in circulation here.
Yes, I realize all 2 billion coins were mint-marked and thus not scarce nor collectible but I seem to recall they were introduced without fanfare, allowing the public to discover them on their own. Or perhaps my memory fails me and I'm all wet.
