I love when rarity combines with eye-appeal and a touch of the unusual. This is an example of a coin that has all three.

While by date, the coin isn't rare, by error it certainly is. We are looking at an 1873 with arrows dime. I have always loved older type coin mint errors. They have character and history that modern errors don't have, and they speak to a time when the minting process was less refined, which doesn't mean that errors were more common, but rather that we can identify when in the minting process this happened rather than the coin just being lost in a sea of automation.

This is an excellent example of a double error on a late 19th-century type coin. This dime has been struck 5% off center, with an additional error as well. It was struck through on the reverse, and looks like a sliver of wood was the culprit, resting on the die when the planchet came into the striking chamber and both received the strike.

In a non-metal and plastic, non-automated mint, there certainly was wood all over the place throughout the building and amidst the minting process. Planchets were often carried in wooden boxes, so we often see Morgan Dollars struck through slivers of wood. Tool boxes were occasionally wooden, and at the New Orleans mint, it has been said that sawdust was used to dry planchets after being washed, so this if true would lend itself to another example of wood being around the striking process.

When the coin was struck, it was resting slightly off center between the dies.

Today we see we see less errors, but that certainly doesn't mean that there were more errors back in the day, because many of them didn't survive or were spent and worn down or simply discarded. Also true is that there were less coins struck and statistically that means less errors overall.

This is a coin that I was very happy to acquire in place into inventory because it belongs with somebody who is a specialist in Seated Liberty coinage.