1957 D LDS

Looks like it was also a RPM. (took a hit on the lower serif, but the upper serif is split also) The damage to the mint mark pretty well cancels out any value for this variety.

RPMs are varieties. LDS is die state. A LDS coin is just worth what the coin is worth. A variety like a RPM could be a real prize on some years and mint marks.

Your was not as collectable as this one, but they are collectable to coin-addicts like me and others. In its heyday it may have look like this before the accident that happened to it:

Note the left side of the mint mark. On the top and bottom you will see splits on the corners. There are called 'split serifs'. They happen when the punch that made the mint mark was not exactly in alignment on each strike. This is called a tilted RPM because the punch was slightly tilted when the mint mark was placed into the die.
They can be miss punched in several directions:

They may look like these:

The directions of the miss punchings is noted on several of these.

Hope this helps a bit. (We could go on for days about this subject. Just a crash course)

Okay, I's be educatd on this My still poor understanding is that for any dated coin there is one master hub pair (obverse and reverse), perhaps only one master die pair, several working hubs, and multiple working dies all produced at the Philadelphia mint. When a mintmark was applied before 1987, it was manually punched (correct word?) into a working die, which was then sent to the branch mint. Sometimes the quality of the punch impression wasn't deemed good enough by the puncher and a second (or more) punch applied, sometimes resulting in shifted impressions of the mintmark on that working die. Likely, the branch mint probably had the authorization to repunch the date or mintmark on the working die as the quality of the struck coins demanded. RPMs (and RPDs) resulted, as illustrated above, which are die varieties within the population of that date and mintmark. What I don't understand is why they're relatively rare. How many strikes of a penny are expected from a die? Wouldn't all exhibit the same RPM variety?

Thanks for all the time you put into educating us newbies. I've learned a lot and appreciate the difference between a variety and die state. VAMs for silver dollars seem to be a different beast, where die states often define a variety and add tremendous value as they evolve.