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by Shawn Halversen, 29 Jul 1993
Yesterday I received a copy of Frank Spadone's book, Major Variety and Oddity Guide, and thought I'd let everyone know about it. If you only read this far make sure that you do not buy this book as your first book about errors. Spadone's work is outdated, contains colorful but vague terms, and includes several faked errors as US mint products. Before I go into some detail let me say that (I believe) the book was first written in the 1960's. This was a time when not too much was known about the minting process, and what could go wrong during minting. Spadone's book does give an idea about how little was actually know about the minting process at the time. For that it is quite intereseting.
As I stated, this book is outdated. One example is that of the "doubled mint marks", which are referred to as repunched mintmarks today. Spadone's convention for describing these is exactly opposite that used today. When he refers to a D/D north, he means that the stronger D in the mintmark is north of the weaker D. Today such a RPM is refered to as D/D south. Another example of outdated terminology is when Spadone refers to "microscopic shift doubling" and ascribes the cause to dies being out of (vertical) alignment. He also claims value for some of these. Today, this doubling is known variously as "machine die doubling", "strike doubling", etc.
This book contains a listing of quite a few errors by date, however it can be difficult to determine what some of them might be. For example, in Jefferson nickels, he lists a "Monticello flame", "alligator on roof", etc. (the first turns out to be a die clash, I have no idea about the second).
Another thing to be wary of is that there are a couple errors shown that are easily shown to be fakes if you understand the minting process. One is a 1961 cent with reeding. This is sure to be a fake. Since reeding is in the collar, this would mean that one of the collars for the cent must have been reeded before being placed into service. This is doubtful.
Overall, Spadone's book sheds an interesting light on what was known about errors a number of years ago, and how much the field has changed since then. However, today it is so outdated, it could not be used a basic reference for errors.
Shawn Halversen
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