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Message:: [QUOTE="GDJMSP, post: 178065, member: 112"]Buy them all, read them all, study them all - several times each. Then go and buy every other book you can on grading coins and do the same thing with them. Then carefully examine every coin you can, graded and raw at coin shows, dealer's shops, on the internet - any where you can find them. Make notes if need be, but more than anything concentrate and study the coins when you are looking at them, compare them to one another, notice the differences, notice the marks and where the marks are, notice the luster and how it differs from coin to coin. Do that with 10,000 coins and you'll have made a good beginning on learning how to grade correctly and accurately. And no I'm not joking, that's just a beginning. Then you have to buy all the books you can on counterfeits and study them - there's lots of them out there, books and the counterfeits. And learning to distinguish counterfeits, altered coins, tooled coins, artificially toned coins - it's all just as important as learning how to grade them. It can take a lifetime of study to learn how to do both. But without doing these things, you stand the risk of ending up with coins you don't really want in your collection. Not everyone can devote that amount of time and effort, and expense for books aren't cheap. And not everyone even has the desire to do so. And that's why we have grading companies, because not everyone can do so.[/QUOTE]