Hi there CT, I want to get better at grading coins.......... Any advice on a good book for coin grading with color pictures inside? Thanks Noah!
I bought both the second and third editions of Coin World's Making the Grade, but while it has huge color photos, they aren't as useful as I hoped at the time. You can't just hold a coin up against a series of photos and see where it fits. That works to some extent for lower grades ("at least three letters visible in LIBERTY"), but it falls apart for MS levels. Making the Grade is valuable because it also has "maps" for each type showing where wear occurs first, and where hits are more or less important on MS coins. What I'd really like is a book that has many photos of different examples for each grade of each coin. I wouldn't especially like paying for it, though. No possible book can substitute for looking at lots and lots and lots of coins, and testing your opinion against the TPG or other buyers and sellers. I'm still a lot closer to the bottom than the top of that learning curve.
Completely agree with @-jeffB..... There really isn’t much better training than handling coins to get a feel for the basics of grading. Personally I needed a better feel for modern grading and found Jason Poe’s (a CT member) book to be an invaluable aid for me. I still wanted to revert back to the way I graded coins in 1980 in my brain. Jason’s book filled that gap for me. There are series that I still struggle with though.
There are two books that I recommend for everyone to learn to grade. First you need a picture reference to compare and give you a visual idea of what the standards are talking about. I recommend the ANA Official Grading Guide, or Q David Bower's Grading Coins by Photographs. I give the edge to QDB because I think the image quality is better, but both are good books. And second, you need a book to help you understand what all the terms mean: strike, luster, wear, eye appeal, etc. I'm biased towards the book I wrote, of course. If you have those two, the only thing you'll need is experience looking at coins.
This is where the Heritage archives becomes extremely valuable. Hundreds of examples of each coin, each date, each series, in every grade imaginable.
Or, more generally, "the Internet". Yeah, there are great resources out there. Now I'll just wait for Someone to chime in with a comment that images on the internet aren't trustworthy, and you should only pay attention to ones that are printed on paper...
There are 3 books that I always recommend - the ANA grading book, the PCGS grading book, and How to Grade US coins by James Halperin. The 3rd used to be available online, and the text still is, but the website is so old that none of the pictures or illustrations work anymore. But in the book they still do. Those are just the first 3. But my full recommendation is to buy and read every book on the subject that you can find - and that's a lot of books. But if you do it you'll have a better background and a better understanding of grading than you get in any other way. Of course you still won't know how to grade, but you must have the background and understanding before you can learn how to grade. And that's the best way there is to get it. I would also make a few other recommendations, or perhaps basic guidelines is a better way to put it. By all means, look at pictures, look at hundreds of thousands of pictures ! But don't try to learn how to grade based on pictures ! Pictures are useful because they show you examples, provide your mind with information. But they can also be harmful unless you have the understanding that any picture is only an example of how 1 specific coin was graded. Ya see, there's about 9 different things that can change or effect the grade of a coin, and any single one of them can do that. And if you looked at 9 different coins, all the same coin, and all the same grade - there can be 9 different reasons, and or combinations of 9 different reasons, that the grade was limited to what it is, or elevated to what it is. So looking at a picture, or a hundred pictures, won't tell you what those reasons are. And any or all of them may or may not be on any coins you subsequently try to grade. That is the limitation of pictures. To learn how to grade accurately and correctly you first have to learn all the criteria, how to recognize them, know them when you see them, know the pluses and minuses that each has, and how much they add or detract from the grade - and why ! And you can't get any of that by looking at pictures. The only ways you can get it is by studying the written word or hands on teaching from another who already knows how to grade. Once you get all of that down pat, then it is the hands on with coins that comes into play. By looking at and studying the coins in hand, that is when the knowledge you have already learned comes into play. That knowledge allows you to see things you otherwise wouldn't have even seen. It is what allows you to know what it is when you do see it, and to know what effect it has on the grade in either direction. Another thing, learning where all the high points on coins are is great stuff to learn. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that wear always occurs on the high points of a coin first. It absolutely does not always occur there first ! Yeah, it very well might, and it commonly does, but it does not always ! It is quite common, stress quite common, for wear to first appear on the lowest points of a coin - the fields ! Wear can literally first appear anywhere on a coin ! One can never forget that. And all wear, located anyplace, caused by anything, is still wear. And if any wear, anywhere is present then the coin absolutely cannot be graded MS. It is also a great idea to read any and all articles you can find on the subject of grading. This is because articles tend to deal more with specific series than many books do. And yeah there are plenty of books written about specific series and grading them. But I don't know of anybody who can buy them all, or has. A big part of the reason for reading, researching, and studying as much as you possibly can is because by doing so you will soon come to find out that much of what you find is in direct contradiction with what you have found elsewhere. And it is then incumbent upon you to determine who is right and who is wrong. And don't ever think that just because something is written in a book that it is true - a great deal of the time it is not ! But you won't ever even have the ability to recognize if something in a book is true or not unless you have the requisite knowledge to do so. Anyway, buy all the books you can buy and read everything you can read. Do that and you'll be well on your way to learning how to grade.
Except when "the market" guides a seller or a TPG to do so, classing the wear as "cabinet friction" or the like.
Agreed, but Jason's photos leave a lot to be desired. @Kentucky recommended an out of print book to me which has only drawings in it for illustrations, it's Brown & Dunn's A Guide To The Grading of United States Coins. It does a more than commendable job in the text, though, and quite useful. He also mentioned another book, James Ruddy's Photograde: Official Photographic Grading Guide for United States Coins, but I haven't gotten around to getting this one yet. I would want to mention the Numismatic Acronyms thread in the CT FAQ section. This hasn't been updated since 2015, but is still quite useful. I have it bookmarked in my browser so that I can save steps whenever I want to consult it. There's not much here in terms of grading acuity, but otherwise invaluable, IMHO. https://www.cointalk.com/threads/cointalks-numismatic-acronym-glossary.257793/
The best I've seen for circulated coins is an oldie but a goodie-"Photograde." The grading standards may be a little conservative but it's an excellent book that can be found on ebay from time to time for a reasonable price.
