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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 2293059, member: 19463&quot;]In &#039;the day&#039; you had to rely a lot on the taste of the dealer.&nbsp; I knew one dealer who I suspect was buying coins cheaply because others avoided their second rate style.&nbsp; I avoided him after a couple bad experiences.&nbsp; There was one dealer who always undergraded and never handled&nbsp; a coin with poor surfaces.&nbsp; His definition of &#039;Fine&#039; was a coin I would like; VF - love.&nbsp; One described each coin with a paragraph so you really had an idea what the coin looked like if you knew the lingo like &#039;whisper of porosity&#039; and &#039;crowded left&#039;.&nbsp; Sometimes you might call a dealer and talk about the coin because you needed to reserve it by phone anyway.&nbsp; Mailing a check without the phone call risked being too late on a coin with multiple buyers.&nbsp; Photos of every coin and PayPal changed all this.&nbsp; I have not talked on the phone with a dealer for years.&nbsp; One dealer called my house and talked to my teen daughter who was the only one home.&nbsp; He said that he had a group of 194 Septimius denarii he&#039;d like to send for me to pick out however many I wanted at $50 each.&nbsp; I thought he meant denarii of 194 AD which would largely be the COS II coins but the package arrived with 194 (count) denarii of which about ten were Eastern (what I collected) and only two were worth the price (which was quite high - I was expecting better coins of the right type).&nbsp; Communications were harder before email or answering machines.&nbsp;&nbsp; Getting the mail late one day could mean disappointment.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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