FS- Fivas And Stanton

I would think reputation as a specialist.
John1

they wrote the book.

most people collect the book varieties rather than an exhaustive list. its true everywhere. people collect RedBook type or the hot 50 or top 100 vams. it gives the collection an end point and a focus. its also useful when comparing your coins to some elses. its much easier to answer a question like "who has the best set of top 100 vams" than it is to answer "who has the best vams collection". more collectors = more demand = more money.

in some cases getting into the book is the bottleneck for third party slab identification.

Mr. J. T. Stanton is not likely to be attributing anything further, sadly. He passed away a while back, 2018 if I recall. I have a few coins purchased from him that I leave in their original holders for that reason.

As authors of the CherryPickers' Guide, Fivaz & Stanton did a great job of combining research from a large number of previous specialists into a couple of volumes, and their attribution has in many cases supplanted previous references, including the source material from whence they drew. By writing the book, they created the premium; they are more "accumulators" than "researchers" in a lot of cases, especially with famous varieties such as the 1955 DDO LWC.

For instance, Indian Head cents had The FIND.ERS Report (F.lying eagle & IN.dian cent D.ie varieties) by Steve & Flynn, and of course the works of Snow and Poliquin, Bowers, Breen, M&M, etc. but the key varieties already identified by some of those authors were also assigned FS numbering in the CPG. The famous 1873 DDO (Breen 1986, FND-001, Snow 1) was classified as FS-101. PCGS identifies it as FS-101 (Snow 1) on holders. The second die pair is Snow 2/FND-002, listed in FS as FS-102.

FS tend to only select what they consider "key" varieties, and those were varieties that already had strong collector premiums associated with them to begin with. However, by aggregating the previous research into a single source, they have further boosted premiums on the coins they choose to list. Wexler lists a billion varieties of Lincoln cents, but most of those will never make it into FS, and therefore they will not see much premiums outside of diehard specialist collectors.

With Morgan dollars, there are thousands of VAMs, but many do not have much of a premium simply because they are so minor that you would never notice their existence without the book. The "Top 100" and "Hot 50" and "Elite Clashed Dies/Super Elite Clashed Dies" books simply collected the most popular VAMs of those types into single sources. Those coins carry a premium not just because they are in a book, but because they are noteworthy enough to be included, and that alone is enough to make prices go up; many VAMs not included in those books are MUCH scarcer or even rare, but too minor to merit their inclusion, so they will never see much premium from the market as a whole.