Coin reference
Key dates, semi-keys, doubled dies, repunched mint marks and the errors worth knowing - 705 coins across 19 lists, with what to look for on each and how to photograph it.
These lists say what is worth a second look and why. They do not quote prices: a value depends on grade, eye appeal and the day, and a number printed here would be out of date before you read it.
Every published die variety, by series and year
Ten thousand documented doubled dies, repunched mint marks and die varieties - what class each one is, where the doubling shows, and the die markers that tell one die from another. Free to read, no account.
Top 100 Most Sought-After U.S. Cents, 1909-Present
The Lincoln cent is the most searched series in American numismatics, and most of what is worth finding in it is still in circulation or sitting in so…
All-time U.S. coinage: colonial roots and major rarities
The coins at the top of American numismatics - the 1804 dollar, the 1913 Liberty Head nickel, the 1933 double eagle - are not coins anybody finds. The…
Lincoln cents 1909-present: keys, semi-keys and honorable mentions
Keys are the dates everybody knows. Semi-keys are where a search actually pays, because they are scarce without being famous, and they turn up in chan…
Five-cent pieces: key dates and major varieties
Five-cent pieces cover more design changes than any other circulating denomination - Shield, Liberty Head, Buffalo, Jefferson - and each has its own k…
Ten-cent pieces: key dates and major varieties
The 1916-D Mercury dime is the key that everybody knows and almost nobody finds, and the counterfeits are common enough that the mint mark deserves a …
Quarters 1964-present
Modern quarters are where new varieties are still being found, because the mintages are enormous and hardly anybody looks. The State, America the Beau…
50 notable error coins and die varieties
An error happens to one coin in the press; a variety happens to a die and then to every coin it strikes. Both are collected, they are worth very diffe…
Top 100 priced Lincoln cent doubled-die listings
A doubled die is not a coin that was struck twice. It is a die that received its design twice, slightly offset, so every coin from that die carries th…
Best of State and Territory quarters
Fifty states, six territories, ten years, and mintages in the hundreds of millions. What makes this series collectable is not scarcity but the number …
Best of America the Beautiful quarters
Fifty-six designs between 2010 and 2021, most of them never seen in change because they were struck in quantities that went straight to collectors. Th…
Best of American Women quarters
The American Women programme ran from 2022 to 2025, and it is the most recent circulating series in which varieties are still being discovered - which…
Top 10 modern one-dollar coins
Modern dollar coins barely circulated, which means most survive in high grade and value turns on errors and low-mintage issues rather than on wear.…
Top 20 Indian Head cents
The Indian Head cent ran from 1859 to 1909 and its keys sit in the 1870s, where mintages collapsed and survivors are genuinely scarce rather than mere…
Top 10 half dollars: available reference selection
Half dollars stopped circulating in 1971 and most people have never handled one, which is why the silver issues survive in quantity and the keys are k…
Top 20 cents: available reference selection
A shorter list than the Top 100, kept to the cents that a reference collection would actually include - the ones where a photograph settles something …
50 bullion, NIFC and collector issues
Bullion, NIFC - not intended for circulation - and collector issues are a different market from circulating coinage: struck for buyers rather than for…
Top 50 coins of the 2000s
Twenty-first century coinage is collected now in a way it was not when it was struck, and the errors of the period - wrong planchets, missing clad lay…
Morgan and Peace VAMs: auction-ranking worklist
VAM numbers come from Van Allen and Mallis, who catalogued the Morgan and Peace dollar dies by their differences - a doubled date, a die crack in a pa…
Recent and one-off issues worth knowing
Privy marks, first-year issues and one-off commemoratives - coins that are news when they are released and reference material afterwards.…
