Question for Joe_collector regarding certified books

[Aman619]

fascinating stuff.

I really have had no interest in coins (but some of the older currency looks really cool!) but hearing you describe your hobby and looking at that early quarter kinda got me thinking a bit... nice job. The historical aspects of early American coins is eye-opening.

[blowout]

Just wanted to add my thanks Tom for your informative posts on the professional grading experiences in the coin hobby. Very informative and very relevant to comics. I, like others have said, have no idea about coin collecting but the similarities with comics regarding pro grading is a real eye opener.

[PovertyRow]

Just wanted to add my thanks Tom for your informative posts on the professional grading experiences in the coin hobby.

 

Me too. I used to collect coins when i was a kid back in the late 50's and early 60's. My parents would give me $209. I went to the bank and exchnaged the $20 for all manner of rolls. Went through the rolls and even then could find Buffalo nickels, Indian head pennies (err - cents - sorry ), the ocassional Barber, etc. My allowance would not let me afford all I found but I usually convinced my parents by opening the Red Book (forget - been a long time - Whitman? Or was that just the holders?).

 

Anyway - my proudest moment was spotting a SLQ in the cash register drawer of a departmnt store - sitting right on top of the quarters - I had a dollar in my pocket after buying my 79 cent fishing tackle box and quickly asked if I would have fou8r quarters for a dollar. Got them and it 0- 1926S in about AU. Don't have it now but man it felt good then!

 

Now I - to the possible dismay of some of my comic friends - am trying to complete a slabbed MS-63 or better 20th Century Type Set. AM about 60& complete. The Barrber and the SLQ are REAL busters. So I am thinking I have to take my own comic book advice and learn better the grading and restoration techniques for coins so I can buy unslabbed. What a thing!

[COI]

I would imagine many early comics are even more scarce, on a relative basis, than early Federal coinage.

 

It sounds that way...although if there were comics from the late 1700's, there's almost no way they would have survived to today. Who knows....maybe there were and we'll never know about them.

 

But just about all of what you're saying can be related to comics in some way. We also have occurences where books are cracked and re-submitted, skewing the census.

[Zonker]

Yes, a Great Thread!

 

I'd just point out the huge difference between hundreds-years-old coins and sixty-year-old comics, a difference that somewhat balances out the order-of-magnitude difference in the age of vintage coins vs. vintage comics:

 

- coins were always understood to have some intrinsic value, whereas;

- comics of the 1940s were intended as throwaway entertainment.

 

So I'd agree that coins and comics minted/published within the last 40 years could reasonably be expected to follow the same path with respect to slabbing, 3rd party grading, etc. but for comics older than 40 years, perhaps the card collecting hobby is the closest parallel--

 

- in both cases the primary market was thought of as kids? (card guys please correct me if I'm wrong)

- both originally (40+ years ago) considered disposable entertainment.

- both are paper collectibles with associated durability issues (different for coins)

 

Finally, I'm using the 40 year cutoff point because the conventional (I believe Overstreet) wisdom is that 1964 was the point when collecting comics came "out of the closet," and the secondary dealers' market matured, hoarding became more common etc. So my questions here would be

- Does anyone know what event in 1964 triggered this?

- Or if 1964 was not the year, when would you estimate such a "cutover" occurred?

 

Cheers,

Z.

[TomB]

It has been a true pleasure to share this information with all of you.

 

That type set you are working on, povertyrow, is a very cool one. It starts with the rather stale (to our eyes) work by Barber and Longacre's Indian Head cent, moves through the quintessential American coin in the Buffalo nickel, includes the alegorical masterpieces of the Walking Liberty half, Standing Liberty quarter and Mercury dime and ends with the pedestrian renditions of the dead presidents. To add some spice there is the ethereal Peace dollar and the workhoarse of American coinage, the Lincoln cent.

 

I advocate to everyone that they should buy what they like with money they can afford to lose. Your idea of learning how to grade coins proficiently is a good one, however, you may want to stick with NGC and PCGS certified coins for the moment as some cleaning methods, specifically wiping, are very difficult to detect and will cost you a bundle if you buy raw. Good luck!

[Joanna]

Tom,

 

This is a fantastic thread and I want to thank you for coming in here and sharing your knowledge with us. Great stuff.

 

-- Joanna

[BronzeBruce13]

Others sliced bits of the edges off of coins to get the precious metal and there would come a point where no one would accept the coin as payment and the government would melt them. Still others were melted because they were holed or terribly bent.

 

Isn't the origin of the "ridged edge" of a coin basically a counter measure developed to deter the "slicing off" of pieces from the edges? Prior, without the ridges, carefully sliced pieces would be hard to detect, but once the ridges were added, wasn't that what stopped the practice?

[TomB]

Thanks, Joanna.

 

Yes, the reeded edge was introduced, at least in part, as an attempt to discourage clipping of coinage for the precious metal content. Previous to the reeded edge there were edge inscriptions on some US coins. Pieces such as the half dollar had written, in incuse, around the edge of the coin things like "FIFTY CENTS OR ONE HALF DOLLAR" as well as having some dashes, dots, slants or arrowheads added. So, if someone were to clip a bit off the edge the next person to handle the coin could theoretically spot the alteration. This did not always work well.

[garthgantu]

This is mostly a guess on my part, but I'm wondering if the "hoarding/collecting" that is generally dated to around 1964 might have been in part attributable to Marvel's launch of superhero titles from late 1961-64 (and of course beyond)...?

 

Of course there were people collecting comics much earlier than this, but most comics didn't have the same sort of continuous storylines that Marvel's superhero books did. If you missed an issue of Superboy or Adventure from 1962, it didn't create a hole in an ongoing story, so the motivation to seek out that back issue must have been significantly lower?

 

Garthgantu

[jtryka]

This is a really neat thread! I am sort of the opposite of the comic folks in that I read/collected comics as a kid, but the coin collecting hobby stayed with me, probably because it was started earlier in my childhood. There are many interesting parallels between the two, even without 3rd party grading.

 

For Poverty Row, I think it's a great endeavor to put together a 20th century type set (are you including the gold? ). A few things I would like to add. The idea of surviving populations certainly applies to early federal coinage, but in my area it really makes a difference. I mainly collect Saint-Gaudens $20 gold pieces (1907-1933), and in 1933 FDR issued an executive order making it illegal for Americans to own gold, so the vast majority were recalled by the treasury and melted. That is why coins like the 1927-S with more than 3 million minted are very rare, or even the 1927-D with a mintage of 180,000 which is traditionally the toughest date in the series (until last year) has only the 10th lowest mintage in the series, yet often can't be purchased for less than $300,000. The 1933, had a mintage of 445,500, but none were placed into circulation. However, we believe about 12 actually made it out of the mint, all were illegal to own, and the secret service has been actively tracking them down for 70 years. The one last year was to be confiscated by the mint, however a court settlement allowed it to be the only one legal to own, and it sold at auction for about $7 million (+$20 to officially pay the mint for the face value of the coin). So there are even relatively recent series where population survival is an issue. But this tends to happen in cycles. Today, our currency has no tangible backing, so a dollar bill is worth a dollar because it says so, and because the people that sell things believe it too. Historically a dollar was defined by a specific weight in gold or silver. At various times, that standard changed, like in 1834 for gold content, or 1853 for silver content. At those times you could melt coins and sell the metal for more than the face value thereof, and that's precisely what people did.

 

As far as the slabbing of coins or comics, I think we share another common problem. I am not sure how comic slabs work, but if you can't remove the book, doesn't that take something away from the experience? How can you read it, feel it, or turn the pages? The same is true with coins, especially the series I am working on now, Bust halves and Saints. Both series have "lettered" edges, so instead of the reeding (or lines) like you see on coins today, they had words. Well, in a slab, you can't see the edges! This is especially fristrating for bust halves (1796-1839) since the early coins often had some crazy errors on the edges, like words being upside-down etc., and you can't see the fun stuff like that in a slab. So I imagine it can be frustrating for you comic guys like that too.

 

As far as the progression of certification in coins and its applicability to comics, I think the parallels are interesting. I recall when certified coins really started to come into vogue, and I remember thinking that it was a little suspect to pay so much for a coin in plastic when there were coins just as nice sitting next to it for a lot less money. However, for rarer dates, they did add credibility in that an independent third party certified the authenticity (this is a problem with many rare dates, either being altered or downright counterfeited). Then they did the impossible, they took the Sheldon scale literally. Before then, you had pretty much 3 grades of uncirculated: BU (or Brilliant Uncirculated) which was MS-60, Choice BU corresponding to MS-63 and Gem BU for MS-65. It was thought that breaking down to single points was ludicrous as there was no way to really define on grade point. Then it started, first MS-64, then MS-62 and 61, then the unthinkable, MS-66, 67, 68, 69 and 70! Personally, I am still of the opinion that no coin should actually grade MS-70, as no coin is perfect. For comics I don't think you had the same issues with the 70 point scale, so they started you right off with the 1-10 with .10 increments (really a 100 point scale). I'm not sure if you feel the same way, but I would question whether human fallibility would allow consistent definitiion in such small increments.

 

The final phase we have seen is the so-called grade rarity, which I personally believe is a misuse of the term rarity. The marketers and others like to make a common state quarter with a mintage so high that every person on the whole planet could have one seem like something rare, and the only way to do this is to define them as "rare" by their condition. Well, with a mintage of 6 billion, even if the highest grade applies to only 0.01% (that's 0.0001) then there would still be 600,000 in that category by definition (and I know the modern lovers love to hammer me on this, and try to explain how it really is rare, and they're entitled to their opinion, but I just don't buy it). The numbers are just way too large! So now you get huge premiums for that one extra point (which I find mindboggling, expecially coins selling for thousands of dollars minted in my lifetime). Then that stellar MS-67 coin they just bought for $5000 suddenly drops to $50 when the first MS-68 is graded. It's all based on what is known as the bigger insufficiently_thoughtful_person theory. The best advice I can give is twofold, compare the price in the holder with the price out of the holder, and beware of how much you pay for than 1 extra grade point.

 

Finally, I am not sure if there is such a thing as a registry with comics, but it has had some good and bad effects on coins. On the negative side, I think it's fueled the modern grade rarity craze, but on a positive note, it gives collectors a way to showcase, compete and share their collections with other collectors. It's really a lot of fun, if you focus on the sharing part instead of the competing part. You can add descriptions to the coins, as well as photos. In that spirit, I will share two of my sets with all of you. The first is my pride, the Saint set, the second is my type set, in honor of poverty row's fine efforts in building one. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy them and maybe learn something!

 

My Saint-Gaudens set

My 20th Century Type Set