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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 1081918, member: 66&quot;]Sheldon did not create a grading system.&nbsp; Sheldon described a pricing relationship between the grades that held true at that time and which had been true for the previous 25 years.&nbsp; He made the mistake of acing as if this relationship was some kind of &quot;natural law&quot;.&nbsp; Actually it was the result of a relatively static number of collectors and incomes.&nbsp; As either the number of collectors grew, or incomes rose the demand pressure on the better grade coins rose and the value or pricing&nbsp; ratios between grades changed.</p><p><br /></p><p>Sheldon set forth his ratios in the book Early American Cents in 1949.&nbsp; By the time the first edition of Penny Whimsy came out in 1958 the ratios for the upper grades were already out of whack so Sheldon introduced a bunch of &quot;adjustment rules&quot; to try and make them work again.&nbsp; By 1967 and the founding of EAC they were ALL out of whack and EAC spent the next five years trying to adjust the basel values an adding additional adjustment rules to try and restore Sheldon&#039;s &quot;Science of cent values&quot; before finally giving up in 1972.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now in all that time it was the PRICES that were being adjusted.&nbsp; The grades G, VG, F, VF, XF, AU, Unc, Gem Unc, and Perfect Unc had not been changed at all and with the exception of Perfect had been around since the erly twentieth century.&nbsp; Sheldon never did anything to develop a grading scale and in fact in his books he says that the first thing you have to do is determine the grade before you can apply his price ratios to it.</p><p><br /></p><p>In 1977 the ANA compiled their definitions of what standards a coin had to meet for each grade, and then for no good reason stuck Sheldon&#039;s original pricing ratios onto each grade.&nbsp; A concept the copper community had abandoned five years earlier.&nbsp; Now everyone calls it the &quot;Sheldon grading scale&quot; when actually it should be the ANA grading scale.</p><p><br /></p><p>One comment about the NC and <i>NC</i>.&nbsp; It changed from NC to <i>NC</i> when a third specimen was known in COLLECTORS hands.&nbsp; You could have more then three specimens known of a variety but if the were all tied up in museums or permanent collections and there weren&#039;t at least three in collector hands it would remain as an NC and not an <i>NC</i>.&nbsp; Today we really don&#039;t&nbsp; differentiate between the two and we just call both types NC&#039;s</p><p><br /></p><p>The 1 - 8 rarity scale is also not original to Sheldon.&nbsp; He borrowed it from an earlier writer.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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