There are some secrets I just won’t share online; this is NOT one of them. It’s about grading coins that go into albums. There just isn’t any point, and I’ll explain why:
Once Upon a Time, many, many years ago, when the Kingdom wasn’t quite so bankrupt, collectors would buy an album and then fill it with the appropriate dates and mint-marks. Most people don’t even know what’s on a penny, let alone what a mint-mark might mean.
The majority of humans will, if they are able, pay someone to do or to know something so they don’t have to think or do anything other than what they “want” to do, which is mainly relax with a mint-julep by a swimming pool, surrounded by luxury, far from the industrial waste and human misery that made it possible to live in such luxury for a while, until they die, after which … who cares?
What has that to do with grading coins, you ask?
Dang, you’re quite right, I wandered from the subject, a prerogative (look it up) of old age.
So as I was saying until I so rudely interrupted myself, the original concept of an album collection was that you’d work over the years to improve your collection, upgrade the coins in there from easy dates to harder and harder dates until you got a handle on the Big Ones, meaning the Greater Keys and Lesser Keys as we in the Work call the Key and Semi-Key Dates.
Just a little Solomonic humor there; I know some of you will appreciate it.
Okay, so grading coins in an album…Oh, yeah, now I remember:
The original idea of an album no longer exists. Today, an album exists merely as a premium to include with the 5 Major Food Groups, meaning the Lincoln 1931-S, the 1914-D, the 1909-S, the 1922 Plain and the Big Guy, the King of Coins, the notorious and often-counterfeited 1909-S VDB, which has been the target of collectors from its first date of issue — collectors stood outside the Mint waiting for it to be released.
So now a fact of life is that when you go to sell your fabulous collection, unless it’s all slabbed and pro-graded, you won’t get a penny more for your XF early dates than you would from a GOOD, so you might as well sell off the better coins and replace them with place-holders, called in the Trade “Fillers”, meaning “GOOD or slightly better”.
Given the mood of the current marketplace, I wouldn’t put anything better than a VF into an album, and that wouldn’t be in a good date, such as a 1924-D or a 1922 Plain.
So as long as you’ll be ending up with a moderate-to-wretched set of coins neatly placed in an album, it might as well be the worst you can come up with, saving the better coins for individual “stand-alone” sales.
That’s not what I like to do, and so far haven’t done. My albums are all self-collected, found by me in the course of nightly Magic Find searches. I prefer those nut-brown coins, and favor them for my albums.
Most of the coins in my completed albums are XF to MS-66, with the earlier coins being whatever I happened to find.
I have had three of my 1909-S VDBs slabbed & graded by PCGS, along with a very strong 1955 Doubled Die, a super-rarity that I found a few months ago in an unsearched bank-sealed bag.
It’s valued at about $2,700, even though it’s technically ungradable due to surface damage; the details are about MS64-65 BN, with no scratches or mars, just surface erosion due to smog and atmospheric exposure over a period of 100 years. In short, rust.
Sure, the rust is very light, but under a 40x loupe, which is where it counts, it shows.
It’s one of my strongest “mojo” magics for my studio and is not for sale. I have others you can buy if you really must have one, including one that has even more depth and distinction; it’s a very unusual coin that makes you think your eyeballs have crossed themselves without your permission.
Frankly, if I were starting out in the collecting field, I’d think seriously about narrowing down your interests to a single type of coin, then become an expert in that coin.
That’s what I did with Lincoln Pennies.
And I’m enough of an expert to know that I can’t possibly know everything, and that no matter how sharp I am, I will eventually be fooled.
What I mean is, you can’t and don’t catch every counterfeit that rolls by. Even the Big Guys get caught once in a while. If you’re doing a lot of coin volume, things tend to get by you that wouldn’t, if you did less with fewer things, but that’s not how you make a living in coins, believe me. It’s just as hard work as running any small business; as a matter of fact, two things strike me as equally difficult: running a restaurant, and road-repair.
How would I conduct a collection?
If it were a planned collection, I’d stick with the old coins, meaning pre and post Colonial, maybe a few early Federal issues. They’re already at a high premium, but not nearly what it will be when the few remaining real Colonials end up in libraries, museums and other institutions, from which they tend to not re-emerge, ever.
Donations against inheritance tax, see?
But it adds up fast, with everyone collecting and donating and collecting and donating, again and again, year after year, because you’re encouraged to do so by the tax situation, which is why I put that “3% Income Tax” coin up on eBay. That was the original income tax in the United States, 5% to the Very Rich, and 3% to the Great Unwashed.
Somehow they managed to run the government on that money. These days, their total national debt wouldn’t fill a gas tank.
That’s called “inflation”, where your money doesn’t buy as much as it used to; prices seem to rise because costs of production, shipping and wages tend to rise during inflationary times. At one and the same time, salaries go down due to cut hours into part-time salaries, and jobs vanish with a “poof” because small business owners can’t afford to pay labor costs with the reduced income they’re seeing in their shops.
Coin collections are often independent of these choppy waves in the economy, and are often held by the Very Rich as what are called “bridges against inflation”.
The Very Rich can afford advice that the Very Poor can’t, but what good would knowledge do, if you don’t have the Basic Wherewithal to back those long-shot horses that you just know can’t lose?
I hope you were able to hang out with me through that long sentence in the previous paragraph, but it’s just something I thought you ought to consider:
With knowledge but no money, you can actually challenge and beat the Very Rich to the Precious Pearl of Great Price and possibly win the race, if you were so inclined.
If you managed to find that Greatest of Great Coins, and sold it, you could retire and do coin searches every night. But wait … you’re doing that already, so you can eliminate the middle-man, the “get rich so you can retire and do what you’re already doing” plan.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby