Expert: Dan Moore - 12/22/2011

Question
I was going through my V nickels and found a unique nickel, and I was wondering if you could help me with it's value. It is not in the Cherry Picker's guide, and I have searched the internet with no luck. What I have is what I believe to be uncirculated, or, at worst at least an AU58 , 1883 Liberty V Nickel with no cents, and is doubled on the reverse. The best way to describe it is as follows. The front of the coin looks normal, but the reverse is not. On the reverse you can easily see that the " E. PLURIBUS UNUM ", and the U and N from United are definitely strongly double struck. You can see some of it with the naked eye, some with a regular magnifying glass, but, all of it is clearly visible with a 10 power loop. I was wondering about it's value. Your help would be appreciated. Thanks, Bart

Answer
Bart,

It was popular to stash away the No Cents nickels back in 1883, so even though there were only about 1/3 as many of the No Cents variety minted as there were the With Cents variety, being stashed away and not circulated, the survival rate is much higher -- therefore the No Cents variety coins are generally worth alot less than the With Cents variety, especially in the higher grades.

As for your coin being double struck, if you are only seeing doubling on one side of the coin, this leads me to believe what you have is actually caused by die deterioration.  If it were double struck, you would see doubling on both sides.

There is an excellent online article (with pictures) that explains the different forms of doubling here :

http://koinpro.tripod.com/Articles/OtherFormsOfDoubling.htm

Strike doubling has much less collector interest compared to doubled dies.  For a nice regular 1883 No Cents nickel in AU condition, you can get about $10-$12 -- with the doubling you describe, perhaps $15 if you can find an interested collector.

I hope this helps,

Dan