Questiong About Double Mint Mark Or Year

The doubled mintmarks are also called re-punched mintmarks or RPMs. They are from the days when they put the mintmarks on dies by hand and sometimes it might be too shallow so the mint tech would tap it again. But sometimes the the second tap didn't align with the first one so it looked doubled.

In the "old days" branch mints would ship dies they did not need to other branches where dies were needed. If the dies were completed with the mint mark of the first mint - the second mint would have to repunch the mint mark to change it to their branch. The end result is one mint mark OVER the other. Only traces of the original show.

The over dates are often because dies finished for one year were not used before the year ended and a new date had to be added. Because each of these recut dies can be identified uniquely - rarity becomes a significant issue.

In the earlist history of the US mint, this use of old dies happend alot so overdates and varieties are the rule of thumb. That is one reason I became interested in that era. NO TWO DIE PAIRS ever were exactly the same. The rarity arises when a die breaks after a very few strikes. Some dies might strike 10s or 100s of thousands of copies while others may have been used only a handful of times.

The mint records can make interesting reading in this regard. In the late 1990s I read a study about die life for US 25 cent working dies. The study indicated that the smallest production ever recorded for a modern working die pair was ONE coin. The die pair broke on the FIRST strike and was retired. Just imagine if you could ID that particular die pair. Well, that is exactly what used to happen and it explains why all coins bearing one particular date are not of equal rarity.

WOW !
It is really very interesting.
Thanks so much for your informative lesson. swamperbob and longnine009.
There are really lots of fun colleting these old days coins !

And I know what will such a double mintmarked coin look like now.