It’s been a few weeks since the 2nd president of the United States of America was immortalized in bronze and aluminum. The John Adams $1 coin was released to the public on May 17th, but you might not have seen them yet. Many banks still have plenty of Washington dollars to go around and haven’t even ordered a stock of Adams dollars, so it might be some time until they end up in people’s pockets. It makes me wonder, 40 presidents from now, how so many of each will continue to be in circulation without making the new ones irrelevant.

The Washington Dollars were released with some fanfare and news-worthiness, but didn’t catch the nation’s attention until minting errors were discovered in high-enough quantities that the average person might run across them. The unique edge-lettering process, never-before seen on regular circulation US coins, was a major selling point when the Washington was released, and also it’s greatest minting error. The US Mint must not have worked the kinks out of the system yet, because the Adams dollar has its share of errors, too.

Within a few days of the Adams dollar’s launch, double-struck edge lettering began to appear on eBay, starting out selling for around $400-$500, and dropping to the $100-$200 range today. Other errors are occuring, most so subtle to only be noticed by fine collectors, but the double-edge-strike is noticeable enough, and common enough, to encourage anyone to double-check their pocket-change.

About.com seems to be the leading authority on the error at this time — they seem to be the first to announce it, and to have a gallery of the variations of double-lettering. Some errors are ’soft’ errors, caused by wear on the dies or foreign material in the system, but the double-edge-lettering appear to be a genuine, human-affected error caused by sending a finished set of coins through the embosser a second time. Collectors are wise to remember that quanitity is key to rarity: The Washington may have been the first and the biggest, but if the Adams coins are rarer, and fewer are in circulation because of the public’s waning interest in the coins, the Adams die errors (or even uncirculation, perfect coins) could potentially be more valuable than the Washingtons. Like the errors and surprises with the Statehood quarters, only by keeping an eye on the coins and an ear to the ground can a coin collector be sure their collection has the best and brightest examples of these coins.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 4:30 am and is filed under collecting fyi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.