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1972 Doubled Die Obverse Lincoln Cent.
1880-CC 8/High-7 Morgan Dollar.
By Kyle Clifford Knapp - December 18, 2024
Original link: https://www.pcgs.com/news/the-details-grade-dec24
One common area of confusion is PCGS policy regarding attribution and assignment of the major and minor varieties emerging from die studies of various United States coinage series. Understanding how such issues are treated in the certification process can prevent surprises and reduce the friction involved in collectors getting their coins in holders with the attribution style of their choosing.
Variety attributions on PCGS holders fall broadly into two categories: “major” varieties that are always attributed and do not incur a fee, and minor die varieties that are attributed only upon customer request via the variety attribution option on a submission form or via the online submission center and do incur an attribution fee in addition to the standard grading service charge.
The first group is composed largely of what has long been called “Red Book” varieties due to their listing in A Guide Book of United States Coins and frequent inclusion in albums that constituted the entry point for most coin collectors in the pre-internet and pre-certification era. Well-known examples from this category include the 1955, 1969-S, and 1972 Doubled Die Obverse Lincoln Cents; 1918/7-S Standing Liberty Quarters; 1836 “Script 8” and “Block 8” Classic Head Quarter Eagles; etc.
The second group – that which requires customer selection of the variety attribution service to be notated – includes thousands of series-specific attributions, such as Sheldon numbers for early large cents, Browning numbers for early quarters, Fortin numbers for Liberty Seated Dimes, VAM numbers for Morgan Dollars, and the popular Fivaz-Stanton (or “Cherrypickers’”) numbers for many United States series.
If you’ve paid much attention to the coin (or “spec”) numbers that PCGS uses to define each United States issue on our holders, population reports, and the PCGS CoinFacts website, you’ll notice they progress in (roughly) numeric order: the first federal issue listed in the “Red Book” (a 1793 Half Cent) is #1000, a 1938 Jefferson nickel is #3000, an 1878 $3 gold piece is #8000, etc. This is the result of PCGS founder John Dannreuther sitting down with a “Red Book” sometime in 1986 and sequentially assigning these numbers one at a time, building the backbone of what would become the PCGS database. As a general rule of thumb, major or mandatory varieties will be within this sequence (for example, the 1880-CC 8/High-7 Morgan Dollar pictured herein as coin #7102, indicating it was recognized from the very earliest days of certification), while variety-program numbers were added later on and are typically five or six digits in length.
One thing to note is that the optional nature of variety attribution means there are occasionally two coin numbers that refer to the same item. Taking our example from above, spec #7102 refers to an 1880-CC 8/High-7 Morgan Dollar; spec #133877 refers to 1880-CC VAM-5, which is the same variety. The difference being that those coins holdered with #133877 will print “VAM-5” attribution on the holder, while those holdered as #7102 will only indicate the overdate. Given this is a distinct “Red Book” or “major” variety from the non-overdate, PCGS would in no circumstance label one of these as a standard 1880-CC (spec #7100).
One final thing to note is that PCGS reserves the right to – in rare circumstances – place an unrequested die variety attribution on a coin if not doing so could result in significant financial harm to the submitter (e.g. an extremely rare colonial variety that might otherwise be sold as a common coin at a fraction of the value). Happy collecting! |
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发表于 2024-12-23 13:09:29
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