Mexico, 10 Pesos 1977 DDR

Nice find, Sander! Now I'll have to look more closely at the ones I have.

I check every single coins what is going through my hands on die axis rotation and if it's not a doubled die. Over the last decade I found a decent amount of doubled dies..

I started reorganizing my collection, and will add the doubled dies in my albums.. in the past I did not..so I don't know how many I have..
Here below is 1 of the bags which should be all doubled dies..








I noticed that the most collectors here in the Netherlands don't have a clue what doubled dies are.. Most of them are saying "double struck" coins..
One day, I hope to have time and catalogue my finds..

I'd agree it definitely is a doubled die. " DDR" tripped me up a bit, before I remembered that by Mexican law, the side with the coat of arms is legally the obverse, so yes, technically this is the reverse of this coin.


As a general rule, it's the people living in those countries that are in the best position to catalogue the varieties in their own coin series, since they're the ones who have access to bulk quantities of the coins to sort through. It would be difficult to make any kind of comprehensive variety catalogue with just the trickle of coins that make it to the US.

Which in turn means that "how well varieties are catalogued" is directly proportional to how many coin collectors live in those countries. So, countries like Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany and Japan all have well-catalogued varieties. Countries like Argentina, Serbia and Vietnam, perhaps less so. Mexico is perhaps a special case; being so close to the US and tourists coming and going all the time, you're more likely to get a good representative sample of coins there, plus there's strong interest in Mexican coins in both the US and in Mexico itself. The information probably already is out there, somewhere.

Language is another potential barrier, since the locals in non-English-speaking countries are likely to do any results-publishing in their own language first, rather than English. The best German varieties references will be in German, for example. It takes time (and, more importantly, growing interest in the English-speaking world) for that scholarship to get translated.

Finally, the other potential barrier to such cataloguing is the quality control for that country's mint. If quality control is lax (yeah, I'm looking at you, Philippines and India), then "errors and varieties" from that country will be super-common, and what everyone else might consider collectable "varieties" the locals will see as "just normal coins" with zero collector interest or premium.

Well said, Sap.