1957/8 Filled B Errors

Filled letters/numbers and "BIE" cents are pretty common on cents from the fifties. I have several dozen of each that I found searching about 2k of 1950-1958 wheat cents.

They are VERY common. I skip by them and put them back in the bags for sale. I personally don't see any value in them - too common, and you can't get listing fees back out of them on ebay most of the time because they are so common.

They are small die chips - places where the die that mints the coins broke and the metal that would normally punch the centers of the letters are gone, thus the letter appears filled. They are erroneously called "filled letters" - they aren't really filled, and there is no extra metal - they just failed to punch.

A "filled die" actually fills in the cavities of the die making letters disappear. Has nothing to do with this common error, although they are very common too. They appear as empty field where there should be detail, or as letters or numbers that lack height and detail....reason for this is because there was gunk in the cavity of the die, and the coin couldn't strike up all the way because of the gunk that got in the way.

You can think about these two things by imagining the tread on a tennis shoe. Remember that the impression you leave behind looks exactly the opposite of the thing that left the impression. If the tread is old and broken, the footprint you would make in fine sand or dirt would leave behind extra raised lines because of the cracks in the tread. This is related to a die crack, die chip, or die break in that the metal of the coin has extra places to fill...like the center of the B of LIBERTY.

If you have gum stuck to the shoe filling in the deeper parts of the tread, the track you will leave behind will be very shallow or missing in the spot where the gum is, because the cavities that are supposed to be in the shoe are filled in with gum, thus the dirt cannot raise up into them to fill them in. This is related to a filled die, where details are weak or missing because of something stuck to the die.

Forensic investigators actually use the same process to identify specific pairs of shoes or tires from the imprints they leave behind at crime scenes. Every single one, once used, has its own 'markers'. What I do in attributing die varieties is in very many ways identical to forensic science.