Posted 02/24/2020 11:17 am
My geometry's a little rusty, but that strikes me (ho ho) as closer to 90 degrees of die rotation.
Makes sense, too, as P&B Withers' Big Green Book (the bible for this series) indicates that same exact die orientation for W610 and W611, just as your photos show it. W612 is ruled out by about five or six other characteristics, aside from its medallic die axis.
We can definitively nail your token's attribution down to W610 because (as per Withers), "The foot of the first limb of H is above the lion's left eye." (Right eye for W611.)
Helpfully, the photos in the Withers book clearly establish that we're talking left/right from the lion's point of view, not ours...imagine if it weren't illustrated!
So it's basically a "listed" variety, and the most common of the three, again says Withers. Whether or not that die rotation was once upon a time regarded as a mint error, it's come to define two of the three known varieties of this token and is by now what more specialized collectors of this series (Who, me?) fully expect to encounter.
I think of these sorts of differences in the Davis/Withers material I collect (Dalton silver, too) as "minting idiosyncrasies," rather than errors.
Best to all!
Tom
Makes sense, too, as P&B Withers' Big Green Book (the bible for this series) indicates that same exact die orientation for W610 and W611, just as your photos show it. W612 is ruled out by about five or six other characteristics, aside from its medallic die axis.
We can definitively nail your token's attribution down to W610 because (as per Withers), "The foot of the first limb of H is above the lion's left eye." (Right eye for W611.)
Helpfully, the photos in the Withers book clearly establish that we're talking left/right from the lion's point of view, not ours...imagine if it weren't illustrated!
So it's basically a "listed" variety, and the most common of the three, again says Withers. Whether or not that die rotation was once upon a time regarded as a mint error, it's come to define two of the three known varieties of this token and is by now what more specialized collectors of this series (Who, me?) fully expect to encounter.
I think of these sorts of differences in the Davis/Withers material I collect (Dalton silver, too) as "minting idiosyncrasies," rather than errors.
Best to all!
Tom
"If everything seems to be under control, you're just not going fast enough."
--- Mario Andretti
