Let’s make this as simple as possible for the thousands of posts by novice collectors who get their numismatic education from social media. Repeat after me: “There is no ‘L’ on rim error.”
Indeed, there are thousands of examples of the “L” on “Liberty” being close to the rim. The cause is a worn out working die at the U.S. Mint. Dies wear out regularly. Hundreds are used in the manufacture of a modern coin. Sometimes Mint operators do not replace the dies when they should.
Worn rims on tires are common. Same with U.S. mint dies.
But the case of “L” close to rim on cents is disturbing because newbies on eBay, Etsy, TikTok and YouTube simply fabricated the error. They saw something, gave it a label, and posted a video about their “unique” discoveries.
The “L” on rim began with a 1944 cent. Suddenly everyone was finding them. The 2.1 billion mintage of the 1944 cent makes it one of the most common wheat cents and the first cent to have a mintage over one billion. The mint manufactured so many to replace the 1943 steel cents, which the public disliked.
TikTok, a Chinese company, is primarily responsible for the “1944 cent ‘L’ close to rim no mint mark error”:
Then the hoax went viral on YouTube.
As you might guess, novice collectors bit the clickbait and started finding “L” close to rim on any date Lincoln cents, asking astronomical prices:
Since then, members of Facebook coin groups continue to believe their cents struck from worn dies are valuable errors. Fact is, those coins are easy to find and hard to sell. All it takes is to go to eBay and check the “sold” filter to see that few people are willing to buy examples.
If you want to collect errors that have any value, you should know what holdering companies and the U.S. Mint actually acknowledge as mistakes. You need two types of directories for that, both found on the tab menu of Proxiblog:
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