There are two common questions I see crop up regularly on various groups and forums that I am a member of. These are along the lines of :
I have a £2 coin and the inscription on the edge is upside down, it’s rare because [insert media here] says so, what’s it worth?
And
I have a Guy Fawks £2 coin and its inscription says “Pemember”, it’s rare because [insert media here] says so, what’s it worth?
Upside-Down Inscriptions
Lets take the edge inscription being upside down first, it is not upside down per-se, certainly not rare and not worth anything additional to the value of the coin.
To understand why this happens, we need to know that the edge inscriptions, reeding, etc. are the first design parts of the coin to be minted. This is to say that a planchet is fed into the machine that just adds the edge inscription and reeding. The machine that does this will be doing many thousand coins an hour, reeding/inscribing, and dumping the contents into a large container ready for the next action.
After the reeding/inscribing, the container will be fed into a hopper where the main design is minted. During both the loading of the container following the reeding/inscribing and again when the coins are fed into the hopper, the coins will move, turn, twist, etc. meaning that when it comes to the main minting operation, the coin can be in either orientation.
Pemember
This one is slightly different, and a bit of an optical illusion. With the milling of the reeding taking place before the edge inscription when the inscription is added the leg of the ‘R’, which is short, falls within one of the low points of the reeding. Again, there is no additional value for this coin.
