Since a mintmark is an identifier for each coin and will tell you where your coin was minted, it stands to reason that you will find the mintmark somewhere on the coin itself. And this is where it might become slightly messy. Yes, the one thing that you can rely on is that a mintmark will be on a coin, or can you? What about when there is no mintmark? What then? There are of course as things go in this world, a few reasons for this.

There is no mintmark used for that particular mint. This can happen because the mint is the original one and therefore doesn’t use a mintmark, or perhaps the coins minted elsewhere weren’t given the mintmark on purpose. For example Lincoln cents which were minted at both the San Francisco mint and the West Point mint in the early 1990’s didn’t use a mintmark, thus making it indistinguishable from the Philadelphia minted Lincoln cents.

There was something wrong with die or grease got clogged up in it and covered the mintmark symbol, thereby resulting in a coin with no mintmark or a very weak mintmark, or the mintmark has been carefully scraped away for fraudulent reasons at some point or other.

Since some coins are rarer than others and sometimes the mintmark or the lack of one is the main reason, the mintmark will be carefully removed to give the appearance of having no mintmark at first glance, Or It could have worn away naturally with the passage of time.

Read (more…)