Little Bust Half pickup at Evansville coin show this weekend

habaraca · October 6, 2019 1:26PM

Triple edge lettering.......

Tibor · October 6, 2019 1:31PM

Very nice. Collectors often forget the "third" side of the coin.

Unknown · October 6, 2019 1:45PM

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stman · October 6, 2019 2:13PM

Isn’t the holder supposed to cover up this edge you speak of.

Unknown · October 6, 2019 2:59PM

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ricko · October 6, 2019 3:07PM

That is interesting... triple lettering...I do not think I have seen that before...may be fairly common, but no one seems to talk about the 'third side' very much.....Cheers, RickO

lkeigwin · October 6, 2019 4:54PM

Edge errors are always fun, especially when you can see them! As Overton said, they include every imaginable combination of lettering.

The castaing machine produced the edge lettering, as many of us know. It wasn't always a smooth operation. Sometimes the planchet would slide up along the bar dies, resulting in drifting edge letters. Sometimes a fault would require cranking back and forth, creating doubled or tripled letters. At times slippage would occur, botching the order of lettering hilariously (like FIFTY CENTS O HALF A LOLLOP).

Tripling of all the letters, however, is considered "very rare". (Extremely rare are doubled edge letters where one set of letters are flipped upside down.)

Here's a description of the castaing machine from an 1819 account.
Lance.

"The machine used for this purpose consists of two plates of steel in form of rulers, on which the edging is engraved, half on the one, and half on the other. One of these plates is immovable, being strongly bound with screws to a copper plate on a board or table; the other is movable, and slides on the copper plate by means of a handle, and a wheel, or pinion, of iron, the teeth of which catch in other teeth, on the surface of the sliding plate. The planchet, being placed horizontally between these two plates, is carried along by the motion of the movable one; so as by the time that it had made half a turn, it is found marked all round."