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On a related note, is the mint mark on coins a separate operation?
It's a little late, but since this thread has been given an entirely relevant necro-bump anyway, I might as well answer this.
The answer is "it depends on which mint we're talking about", but for most mints, private and government-owned, usually the answer is "no". Mintmarks are usually added to the design at the master-die stage. For smaller, private mints, they'll usually have only just one die, anyway - the practice of having a chain of "master dies", "sub-master hubs", and "working dies" is really only needed for large high-capacity government mints where mintages are so high that multiple dies are going to be required.
Having mint-marks added as a separate stage of die-making is really only employed in a few specific circumstances: a very large government minting organization, with centralized master-die production but multiple branch-mint locations. The US mint, for example, used to do this, with master dies made mint-mark-less and shipped out to the various branch mints, where the mintmarks were added locally. I believe Germany still does this. The British
Royal Mint used to have branch mints all over the world for producing gold sovereigns; mintmarks would be added to the sovereign sub-master dies in London, then the dies shipped out to the colonies.
Applying mintmarks as a separate stage of actually striking the coin is very rare, as this is a laborious process that usually causes more damage and disfigurement to the coin that a mint mark would usually warrant. I can only think of one example where this routinely occurred: Australia has in the past issued "mintmarked" or "privy marked" NCLT dollar coins, where the coins were actually struck in Canberra but the mintmark was applied using a travelling press that travelled around the country to various coin shows and other public events where the specially mintmarked coins would be exclusively sold. But I don't see why a private mint would ever need to do this.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis