Meet Shawn Bell - Doubled Die Discoverer and Coin Collector

Shawn Bell is a rising star in the error and variety coin collecting field. He is a diligent searcher of freshly minted coinage, always on the lookout for new error coins and die varieties to introduce to the coin collecting hobby via his "bigbuckbell" eBay auction business.

Like most coin collectors, Shawn, who is 38, started collecting coins as a kid. He has collected on and off all his life until really taking it seriously in the last 3 or 4 years. He found his first doubled die coin in 1985, when he noticed that the reverse of a 1983-P penny looked very different than it should. Unfortunately, he accidentally spent the coin, but this whetted his appetite for more, and ever since then Shawn checks all of his pocket change...and then some...

Since the high profile Statehood Quarter errors began emerging a few years ago, Shawn has become seriously hooked on the die variety searching hobby. He searches at least a bank box worth of (usually) brand new pennies each week (that's 2,500 coins.) He also searches roughly $500 to $800 worth of other coin denominations weekly, amounting to at least 5,000 to 10,000 more coins. Shawn is very quick to credit his wife, Shelly, for her part in the coin searching effort. Shelly is the one who hauls all those coins back and forth from the banks, and sweet talks the tellers into special ordering the boxes of brand new coins for her husband to check. If you were to ask Shawn if luck was the secret to his success, he'd chuckle and say that it sure helps, but sheer bleeping persistence is the real secret. You just have to search lots of coins!

So, what does Shawn look for during his searches? He's not just looking at dates and mint marks; he's looking for the tiniest, nearly microscopic differences between a normal coin and flawed one. Sometimes this is in the form of a mint mark that has been applied to the coin twice, one mark on top of the other. Sometimes Shawn notices that the coin designs are ever so slightly doubled in a one or more small places. Another thing Shawn searches for is missing letters, numbers, or devices, which have been blocked from appearing on the coin because of grease or dirt getting into the tiny recesses of the coining dies. And sometimes, the errors are so obvious that they jump right out at you, like the Washington Presidential Dollar with a double edge inscription that Shawn was the first to find shortly after the Washington Dollar was released.

Shawn Bell proudly claims credit for discovering more than a dozen listed die varieties, including the very first authenticated doubled die Presidential Dollar! The listing below contains some of the varieties he was the very first to report, and which have been verified, authenticated, and listed by leading variety coin experts John Wexler and/or Billy Crawford. (The codes such as WDDR-001 can be interpreted as follows: the first letter, W or C, stands for Wexler or Crawford, whoever has authenticated and listed the variety for publication in their catalogs. The DDR stands for Doubled Die Reverse; DDO means Doubled Die Obverse. The -001 is the sequence number; each variety type, as it is found and listed, gets a unique identifier in numerical order.)

2007-P $1 Washington WDDR-001 - doubled Liberty's inner elbow (type 1)

2007-P $1 Washington WDDR-002 - doubled Liberty's inner elbow (type 2)

2007-P $1 Washington WDDR-003 - doubled Liberty's inner elbow (type 3)

2006-D 1c CDDR-003 - wavy step variety

2005-P 5c Ocean In View CDDR-039 - doubled tree variety

2005-P 5c Ocean In View CDDR-048 - doubled tree variety

1999-D 25c Delaware CDDO-001 - doubled earlobe variety

2000-D 25c Virginia CDDO-001/WDDO-001 - doubled earlobe variety

2001-P 25c Vermont CDDO-001/WDDO-001 - doubled earlobe variety

2004-P 25c Wisconsin CDDO-001/WDDO-001 - doubled earlobe variety

2005-P 25c Oregon CDDR-003/WDDR-008 - doubled volcano variety

2005-P 25c Oregon CDDR-001 - doubled earlobe variety

2006-P 25c Colorado CDDR-001 - doubled earlobe variety

2007-P 25c Montana CDDO-001 - doubled earlobe variety plus obverse clash

Shawn tells us that all of the varieties above can be seen in various issues of Billy Crawford's Die Variety News magazine, starting with issue 4 and continuing through to issue 8. No doubt we'll be seeing a lot more of Shawn's discoveries in future issues of Die Variety News!