Errors and Mistakes

The Vancouver Sun runs a sidebar in its Road to 2010 weekly feature called Collectors' Corner ... and it seems tailor-made for this blog. Enjoy.

In the realm of coin and stamp collecting, mistakes are generally prized more than when the item is correctly manufactured. When someone screws up in a process that is now highly automated, owning one of the resulting mistakes carries a certain cachet.

Perhaps the most famous example is 1918 Inverted Jenny error, when the U.S. post office accidentally printed a Curtiss JN-4 biplane upside down on a sheet of its new 24-cent airmail stamps.

The result is that a single unused stamp from that sheet is now worth more than $375,000 and a block of four is worth a cool $1.25 million.

You won't get rich on Vancouver 2010 errors, but perhaps the best one to date is the accidental printing of the Ilanaaq Olympic logo on a new Paralympic 25-cent coin instead of the Paralympic logo.

In the close, but still separated worlds of the Olympics and Paralympics, such a crossover is not wanted.

Although the Royal Canadian Mint made 30,000 sets of the coins, which sell for about $25, only a few thousand are believed to contain the error. The mint says it held back 8,000 sets and will destroy them after a corrected coin is minted.

Brian Grant Duff of the Bay Coins and Stamps says the set is now worth upwards of $400.