Well, call me cynical—you can—but I see no benefit in this nonsense for true collectors. The entire concept simply creates a monetary autocracy for the benefit of the auction houses. I am not against grading per se. When I first started collecting, I bought milled coinage and became totally disillusioned. Coins I had purchased as 'Uncirculated' were suddenly graded as 'Extremely Fine' by those very same dealers if I tried to trade them back. When I remonstrated, I was told, "You must have handled them." Well, I did on occasion, holding them carefully by the edges, but I certainly never gave them to the kids to play with! Disgusted, I ended up trading my 18th and 19th-century pattern shilling collection for Polar and Naval medals. Condition was largely irrelevant there; the intrinsic value rarely fluctuated based on wear because the worth was tied entirely to the history and the recipient. The man was either at Waterloo or Trafalgar, or he wasn't. In later years, I regretted that move. Buying by descriptive grades used to be far more objective and could work to your advantage if you knew what to look for. I had my own rigid standards—for instance, if a coin lacked the central vein in a laurel leaf, it could never be classed as Uncirculated. That suited me perfectly because, until it came time to sell, I largely ignored the dealers' opinions. Following a few dismal experiences, I eventually came to see the value of third-party slabbing to preserve condition and guarantee authenticity. Yet, it sanitises the hobby; you can no longer hold the history in your hand once it is encased in plastic. Today, I slab certain shipwreck coins purely to preserve their provenance—it simplifies things and, to be quite trite, I happen to like the blue special labels. Ironically what I slab could hardly be damaged by handling they usually big lumps of worn silver. But applying the Sheldon scale to ancient coins is a different beast entirely. To see how absurd it becomes, one only has to look at the US market. A common 1881-S Morgan silver dollar can be picked up in a perfectly respectable MS 60 slab for a modest $100. But find one that hits the mythical, flawless pinnacle of MS 70, and you are looking at an astronomical price tag stretching well into six figures at auction. NGC grades MS 69 at $45,000. Trying to force that logic onto ancient, hand-struck flans is pure greed. It will only serve the auction houses and, to a lesser extent, the dealers. I can easily imagine a recent boardroom conversation: "Hey, that was a great idea employing that fantasist marketing guy!" "Yeah, his last description was superb. How do you improve on: 'The iridescent, luminous steel-blue and red flashes in the fields are reminiscent of midsummer Mediterranean waters, illuminated by phosphorus as the waves gently roll ashore, shortly to be tinged red by the blood of Legionaries—as superbly visualised by the fantastic flan of this superlative example'?" "True, that quadrupled the estimate. But can we squeeze out more?" "Right, so why don't we apply the numerical Sheldon scale to ancients?" "How so?" "Well, how many Judaea Capta denarii do you think would ever grade at MS 70? Not many. In fact, none. But if we can find just one or two that look the part, and let the marketing team run wild, there will always be some rich guy desperate to brag that they own the ultimate 'best of the best'. What was a standard $1,500 coin suddenly becomes a $500,000 trophy." "Brilliant. Let's see if we can get the grading companies to run with it, maybe they can come up with a cool gold label"
