Coin 'Topography'

You're talking about How to Grade US Coins published by James Halperin in 1985, whether you're aware of it or not. Go buy it so you can see the same colors applied to every US issue.

Just so you know, it's the publication upon which PCGS and NGC helped form their grading standards, and after becoming bored with establishing modern grading standards Mr. Halperin went out and founded Heritage Auctions with Steve Ivy. That was after liquidating the investors' fund for rare coins he established, which returned 460% to investors in a 4-year period. Oh, and while he was at it he wrote two rather important science fiction books, one of which is currently in development by Morgan Freeman's company as a movie.

And coins are barely the beginning of what he collects:

http://www.jhalpe.com/

A true Renaissance Man.

Haha well there you go, Dave, I didn't see your post before posting my last. Thanks for knowing what I was talking about!

This isn't automatic, rking007. Grading is an expertise, a teachable talent but all the same a learned one. Wear patterns are but a small slice of the picture because with every coin issue, ever, one must always factor die wear, strike pressure, planchet quality and the phase of the moon (perhaps not the latter) into a judgment of the qualities of a given coin.

Knowing what wears first on a Morgan dollar is not so much help but obfuscation if the Morgan you hold was minted in New Orleans. The obverse of the Seated coin you hold will likely be called a liar, grade-wise, by the reverse. The left corn stalk of a Liberty nickel has undergone circulation wear before the planchet ever reached the press. Every Lincoln Cent has only circulated as much as the degree of die wear tells upon the coin released into the public hand.

These are all different. Each series is different; heck, little continuity exists between individual mintages of each series. No general rule applies to grading except one:

Learn the coin.

Numismatics is about that differentiation, because no two guys/gals at the Mint press were the same. No two designs, no two processes, no two days were the same. It's our job to figure those differences; to learn the subtleties of the issues we like, knowing that very little of what we learn here matters at all there.

The fact that James Halperin collected all of this into one book should not discount the fact that he essentially had to learn eleventeen different languages, numismatically-speaking, to do it. What he realized was that one can look at a coin, imagine the die, picture it in his mind's eye, and conclude where that coin will wear first. All that matters afterward is to test the theory by looking at thousands of coins to determine if you're correct.

Which is the point. You can read every book, and none of them will offer the least of help until you've looked at coins. Nothing on the Internet, nothing printed on treeware, is ever going to be more than a minor nudge in the right direction.

You have to look at coins.