Richard

I buy, photograph, catalog, and sell coins. U.S. type, Lincoln cents, silver and gold bullion, and whole estates that arrive in a shoebox with no inventory and no idea what is in it. That is the front of the business, and it is where most of the guides on this site come from.

What I collect is exonumia: medals and tokens, the material that falls outside the Red Book and gets valued badly for exactly that reason. Presidential campaign medals, medallic Lincoln, and pre-1900 Washingtoniana above all. It is a field where attribution is the whole game. A Washington piece is a Baker number before it is anything else. A campaign medalet struck through 1892 carries a Sullivan-DeWitt number and one struck after it cannot, which is where Hake takes over. A Lincoln piece is placed by King. Knowing which reference governs which piece, and precisely where each one stops, is the difference between a considered price and a guess.

That habit is what I bring to the coin side. Handling inherited collections teaches you what a reference book cannot: how often the value sits in three pieces out of four hundred, and how much a well-meant polish takes off a coin before it ever reaches a counter. When a guide here tells you not to clean a coin, that is not received wisdom. It is what I have watched cleaning do to an offer.

I also built the software I use to prepare my own listings, which standardizes photography, catalog references, and grading detail so a piece is described the same way every time. Working at that resolution makes it obvious when a description is leaving something out.

I am not a professional grader, and this site is not an appraisal service. Where a question needs a credentialed answer, the guides point to the people who give one: PCGS, NGC, the ANA, and CAC. What I can tell you is what happens when you carry a collection into a shop, and what the person on the other side of the counter is actually looking at.