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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 1187869, member: 11668&quot;]When the Presidential dollar series started, IGWT was part of the edge lettering. That meant that when the media published pictures of the obverse and reverse of the new coins, IGWT wasn&#039;t visible. That led to a lot of often-outraged complaints about the motto being left off of the coins, which of course it hadn&#039;t been. Some of your Google hits will be referring to that whole brouhaha.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Then a few months later, it transpired that a batch of some tens of thousands of 2007 Presidential dollars had accidentally skipped the edge-lettering step in the production process. Those error coins were thus missing not only IGWT, but also EPU and the date and mintmark. The errors started selling for several hundred bucks on the collector market. Some more of the Google hits will be talking about that issue.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>As a result of both of the above stories (and of some public confusion between the two), Congress eventually told the Mint to take IGWT off the edge of the Presidential dollars and put it on one side. That was done beginning with the 2009 coins. The rest of the edge lettering (EPU and the date and mintmark) was left alone, with 13 stars added to take up the space that IGWT used to fill.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>So if there are Grant dollars lacking IGWT, they&#039;d have to be the result of some minting error that affected the area of the obverse where the motto is supposed to be. That could be a grease-filled die (dirt and machine grease build up in the recesses of the die, causing a certain part of the design to become mushy-looking or even entirely absent), or it could be a cud (a piece of the die actually breaks off, leaving a large lump on the coin where that part of the design ought to be).</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>There&#039;d be some precedent for the latter. Back in the &#039;70s, there was a cent die that just happened to develop a medium-sized cud right over the word &quot;God&quot; in the motto. Some dealer got hold of a quantity of the resulting error coins and started advertising them as &quot;Atheist cents&quot;--and thus he managed to sell them at quite a large advance over the cost of a run-of-the-mill cud error. Gotta love marketing....&nbsp; <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie11" alt=":rolleyes:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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