Error Coin Values Book
U.S. coins, and the line between a true mint error and ordinary damage.
A field guide to telling a genuine mint error from ordinary post‑mint damage, with close‑up photographs and technical diagrams, printed in full color.
What she writes
Vera Holcomb writes identification guides for ordinary collectors: people going through a jar, a drawer, or a box out of an attic, trying to tell a genuine piece from something merely old and damaged.
She works from what can be checked: a test you can run yourself, a photograph to compare against, and a value you look up today rather than read off an old table.
The rule the guides are built on
Nothing gets asserted that a reader can’t verify for themselves. If a claim can’t be tested at a kitchen table with a lamp, a loupe and a scale — or checked against a published figure — it doesn’t go in the book.
That includes prices. A number printed in a book is a number from the day it was printed. The guides teach you where to look it up today instead.
The guides
More guides in the same family are in the works — other coins, paper money, tokens, hallmarks on old silver. Same method, different material. They appear here as they are published.
Before you trust any guide — including this one
There are a lot of thin books about old things. Four questions sort them out, and they cost you about a minute in the look‑inside preview.
- Does it show the thing, or describe it? Identification is visual. A guide about telling one mark from another that has no close‑up photographs is asking you to take its word for it.
- Does it print a price as if it were a fact? Prices move. A table that claims to know today’s number is either guessing or quoting something old. A useful guide sends you to a live source instead.
- Does it tell you what would prove it wrong? Anyone can list what a genuine piece looks like. The useful part is the look‑alike: the common damage that fools people, and how to rule it out.
- Is there anyone behind it? A name with no page, no way to write to them and nothing else to their name is a warning. That is exactly why this page exists.
Plain facts about this name
- Vera Holcomb is a pen name. The guides are written and published under it by Bayside Press. It is not the legal name of a person you could look up, and no claim is made otherwise.
- No certification, no affiliation. Nothing here is affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by the United States Mint, any grading service, or any collectors’ association. The guides do not appraise, price or certify anything, and no title, qualification or membership is claimed.
- The images. The author portrait on this page and the cover artwork were made with the help of AI tools. The photographs of the objects inside the guides are real, and their sources are credited in each book.
- Nothing is for sale on this page. The companion downloads are free and always will be: no purchase, no account, no email required.
Write to her
Found a mistake in a guide? Think something in it is wrong? Say so — that is how the next edition gets better.
What she can’t do: tell you what your piece is or what it is worth from a photograph. No honest person can, and a guide that pretends otherwise is the sort this page just warned you about.