1964-D Doubled Die Obverse WDDO-018

Description

The 1964-D Doubled Die Obverse WDDO-018 is a doubled obverse die variety originating from the Denver Mint's massive 1964 cent production campaign. With 3,799,071,500 cents struck at Denver that year — a figure that dwarfed all prior single-facility Lincoln cent mintages — the volume of die manufacturing required to sustain production was immense. Each obverse working die was created by pressing the master hub into a die blank multiple times, a process that inherently carried the risk of slight misalignment between successive impressions. When such misalignment occurred, it left a secondary ghost image of the design elements permanently embedded in the die face, creating a doubled die variety that would reproduce on every coin subsequently struck. The sheer number of hubbing sessions conducted at the Denver Mint during 1964 made it statistically inevitable that multiple doubled die obverse varieties would emerge, and the Wexler catalog has documented them systematically. WDDO-018 represents one of these independently created hubbing anomalies. The enormous surviving population of 1964-D cents means that undiscovered examples of this variety likely remain in circulation accumulations, rolls, and bags that have never been systematically examined by variety specialists. This was the final year that the Denver Mint applied the "D" mint mark to Lincoln cents before the 1965-67 suspension of mint marks, a policy change driven by the coin shortage crisis. The coin was struck on a standard 95% copper and 5% tin-zinc planchet at 19mm diameter.

Attribution History

• Discovered by Wexler Team

External References