by Ken Potter – NLG

Image © Ken Potter 2011

June 24, 2011 — Gerald Fishman sent in this beautiful RPM on a 1936-D cent that is virtually a D & D (or some might argue is two separate Ds). At first glance, I couldn’t see the secondary D. Nonetheless after titling it in just the right position, I found it to be a beauty of an RPM.

When looking at it from the west, all I could see was a vertical bar that is wider than any of the die scratches in the area, which seemed promising, but there didn’t seem to be any detectable serifs and there seemed to be an incuse area where the belly of the D should have been. If I wouldn’t have looked any further, I would have wrote it off as tiny gouge blended in with a bunch of die scratches and missed it completely.

However, when looked at it from the east with the top of the coin tilted slightly downward in moderate lighting, (too much light blasted it out of view), the entire D complete with rudimentary serifs popped out at me.

There are a number of essentially vertical die scratches on this coin in the area of the date. They are the result of fine-grit aluminum oxide cloth, a lapping stone or other fine-grit abrasive that has nothing in common with the secondary D but tends to hide the D until you get it in the right position.

Due to its extreme separation, Bill Fivaz and I have slated it for inclusion in the Cherrypickers’ Guide To Rare Die Varieties 6th Edition Vol.1 by Fivaz and JT Stanton as FS-501 for the date/Mint/denomination.