1881 Cent N Repunched

Sharper closeup would help.

There are any number of repunched N's in the 1881's, because the master that cut the dies for the Obv 1's was from the 1876 mint year. Since all the N's on the 1876's were single-footed serifs on the left, the workers on the floor had to use a manual hand-punch to make all the N serifs full-footed. Now maybe some of the workers took the hammer and punch in their hands after a "liquid lunch", but their ability to keep the punch directly on top of their work left much to be desires. You find many double-punched N's, some triple-punched N's and even a quad. Some are greatly offset from the initial punch so there is lots of space between the strikes. We put some in the 65th Charlton (2011) in the Vicky varieties in the back, but we only had so many pages that Charlton gave us. We could have included 5-6 more 1881 repunches. Good ones have a small premium from 2-4X a regular 1881, some triples more. If you find an 1881 WITHOUT the N's repunched, you are talking bib big dollars.