I bought these coins and one was listed as a 1866 but in the picture the third digit is an upside down six or it is a 9 that is printed the wrong way. What is this? I know this is a bad picture but I tried to adjust the brightness and contrast to make it more legible.
Here is the 1866 actually. I hope this is just gunk because it does have full "LIBERTY". I would just scan it since I don't have to worry about luster or rainbow toning although my one HP scanner does capture coins well in high resolution.
I was wrong. The real 66 is covered with corrosion. The 65 is a well worn coin with images shot at an angle and out of focus. You will get better answers when you fix your image problems. Hope you get it figured out.
Yes, I have to get them in hand to see what the deal with. I can't even tell what is on that 1866, could be corrosion, could be gunk, probably both. Looks VF details. Probably needs to be soaked in distilled water and use Verdicare on it.
It can't be an upside down 9. The dates on these coins was punched into the dies using a one piece four digit logotype punch. In order to have an upside down digit the entire punch and therefore all four digits would have to be upside down. (This did happen on occasion. The 1844/81 and 1851/81 large cents are actually examples of the date being punched in upside down and then punched in correctly. The "81" is actually the upside down 18. There is also the 1858 over inverted date half dime. There may be others.) Before 1840 you could have an individual number punched in upside down because they used separate digit punches. In 1840 the used separate punches, experimented with two digit punches, and finally adopted the four digit punch.
