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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Burton Strauss III, post: 2260690, member: 59677&quot;]Honestly, don&#039;t bother scanning a photocopy. It won&#039;t tell us anything.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are several price guides, each of which tries to hit a specific niche. And all of which are somewhat theoretical.</p><p><br /></p><p>There is a guide for sight-unseen certified coins - that&#039;s a price that two dealers would trade a coin based on the certified grade. Works OK for run-of-the-mill MS62 Morgans, but for any unusual or rare coin, they are no longer all equivalent.</p><p><br /></p><p>There is a guide for dealer transactions (the Greysheet) which shows bid and ask prices (bid is supposedly what a dealer would pay and ask is what they would sell for). The problem with the Greysheet is that they&#039;ll sell copies to any Tom, Dick or Harry. Thus all of us visit coins shows expecting to buy at bid. So dealers pay 10% or 20% below (&quot;back&quot;) of bid and sell at bid.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are retail price guides (the coin magazines, several on-line guides) which show approximately what you would expect to pay at a bricks &amp; mortar shop.</p><p><br /></p><p>Remember, the world of numismatics is so broad, that a dealer can&#039;t be expert in much of anything, let alone everything. Even within US coins - dealers specialize in Early American Coppers (EAC), Classic coins, Modern Coins, etc.&nbsp;&nbsp; So if you take your collection of, say Lincoln Cents to a dealer who specializes in Seated Liberty coinage... he may recognize the 1909S VDB and the 1955 double die, but not much else. Or the inverse.</p><p><br /></p><p>As much as there is to know from 250 years of US coins, the book of knowledge for world coins is many times as large. The &#039;catalog&#039; is something like 5 volumes each the size of a big phone book. And there are not a lot of shops selling &#039;world coins&#039; - so your chances of a random shop being knowledgeable in what you have is small...</p><p><br /></p><p>There are price guides on the NGC and PCGS sites - those represent retail prices for coins in the grade certified ONLY by that company.</p><p><br /></p><p>And I could keep going,,,[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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