US Mint Error Coins

3 great online resources on error coins

Searching for error coins can be a fun and potentially rewarding hobby. The key to being successful with any hobby is learning where to find knowledgeable resources. We’ve mentioned a couple of books that we found particularly helpful while researching error coin collecting:

• The Official Price Guide to Mint Errors by Alan Herbert
• Strike it Rich with Pocket Change: Error Coins bring Big Money by Ken Potter and Brian Allen

Type “error coins” in any search engine and you’ll find plenty of links to sites on this topic. Below are three sites that we’ve found particularly helpful.

1. Mint Error News
   We’ve reviewed Mint Error News in a previous post. We discovered this site shortly after we became interested in error coins and kept returning for the helpful and up-to-date information it provides. The website provides a detail error coin glossary with photos and a helpful pricing guide.
2. Baker Numismatics
   This family run coin collecting business has a wonderful website dedicated to helping collectors “find answers to their questions.” The site provides a very helpful learning section on error coins. The site also includes useful articles on different facets of coin collecting. One in particular offered details on State quarters with missing clad layers. This article is a great education on how dealers authenticate error coins and the unfortunate issue of fraudulent error coins.
3. Ken Potter’s Variety Vault
   Ken Potter co-wrote the book that helped kicked off our interest in error coins: Strike it Rich with Pocket Change: Error Coins bring Big Money. His website provides outstanding highly detailed macro photos of coins. The details captured in the photos really gives us an apprecation for beauty of coins.  Suffice it to say, this is a website with articles and information written by someone acknowledged to be a leading expert in the field of error coin collecting. For Simpsons fans, be sure to check out the photos of the Simpson coins.

Extensive online resource for error coin information

A great resource for error coin collectors is minterrornews.com. This site is the online version of a print magazine dedicated to mint error-related information. Mike Byers is the publisher and editor of this publication. According to the site’s about us page, Mike has been a professional numinsmatist since 1978 and is the largest dealer of the world’s rarest mint error coins.

Mint Error News delivers many great features for the error coin collector, including:

• An error coin category glossary illustrated with photo examples
• A helpful pricing guide that provides compiled by the top major error coin dealers

The site is a highly informative resource on error coins. Additionally, Mint Error Coin News provides links to many of the major collectors as well as extensive article base.

Error Coin Book Review: The Official Price Guide to Mint Errors

As my wife and I educate ourselves on error coins, one book has stood out as a resource for us: The Official Price Guide to Mint Errors by Alan Herbert. In its seventh edition, this guide has been available to error coin collectors since 1974. The book provides details on over 400 classes of minting varieties.  

Error Coin Resource: Strike it Rich with Pocket Change

If you’re looking for a very well organized book on error coins, then you’ll appreciate Strike it Rich with Pocket Change: Error Coins bring Big Money. Written by Ken Potter and Brian Allen, we find this book to be an invaluable resource in quickly and easily finding information on specific coin types.

This extensive guide is perfect for the beginning error coin collector. Ken and Brian provide detailed information on error coins with more than 1,500 large illustrations to assist with identification. Additonally they provide an easy-to-follow grading scale.

We appreciate how Ken and Brian provide beginning collectors with the necessary information to get started with this hobby, including evaluating, protecting and selling coins. Additionally, the book offers great tips on how to search for error coins. If you’re serious about collecting error coins, then we highly recommend this guide.

What are Error Coins?

Quite simply, they’re coin mistakes made at the mint during the production process. Due to stringent control systems, most of these mistakes never see the light of day. However, a fairly large number find their way out into circulation.

Error coins come in several varieties, including:

• Off-center: An error where the coin is struck partially on the coin blank, showing only a portion of the coin design.
• Double die: An error where the coin is struck by a die that has a doubled image on it. A most often cited coin is a 1955 Lincoln penny with a doubled date on the image.
• Clipped planchet: An error where the coin is struck on a coin blank with a portion of the metal is missing. The clipped area of the coin will be shaped like a crescent moon.

A fun activity in our family is to search the loose change on a monthly basis for error coins. A 7x magnifying glass our loupe is handy to help locate the small errors.

Most error coins fetch a few dollars with online auctions sites like EBay. But occasionally, you might find one that can be worth hundreds if not thousands of dollars.