Superb Mint

Finest Known Coins Collection

Some people collect only the finest example known of particular coins (called Finest Known coins), paying some very impressive premiums for that privilege. For example, a coin worth $50 in Choice Uncirculated condition could be worth $5,000 (or even $50,000) in Superb Uncirculated condition. Recently, a 1970 cent sold for $30,000 in MS-70. (You can buy the same coin in MS-69 for $30.) Of course, you might question the soundness of paying $30,000 if the owner had to resell it anytime soon.

Finest Known does not always mean fine quality, however. Many of the earliest U.S. coins are not available in Uncirculated condition, and the finest example known may rate a grade of only Extremely Fine, if that. Only a few coins, most of them modern, are known in the top grade of 70 on the Sheldon-Breen grading scale.

The Sheldon-Breen grading scale rates the condition of coins using a scale from 1 to 70, with 1 being the worst condition and 70 being the best. For the most part, 70 is a theoretical grade representing absolute perfection.

Even coins of the same denomination from the same year may have wildly different Finest Known examples. For example, the finest 1865 $10 gold pieces graded by the Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS) are two examples at the MS-63 (Choice Uncirculated) level. By the same token, the finest PCGSgraded 1865-S $10 gold piece is a single AU-53 (About Uncirculated). This is the opposite of what collectors expect to find, because more than four times as many $10 gold pieces were minted at San Francisco as Philadelphia in 1865. What it really means is that fewer of the 1865-S $10 gold pieces were saved, because most of the major collectors at the time lived in the eastern United States, and only a few of them were concerned with collecting coins with different mintmarks (the tiny letters on coins that tell where a coin was made).

Therefore, a collection of Finest Knowns may contain coins ranging from Extremely Fine (circulated) all the way to Superb Uncirculated. Although the appearance and quality of the coins in such a set won’t be uniform, you can bet that any numismatist worth his salt would drool over it!

Collecting only Finest Known coins carries one huge financial risk — that a better coin may come along tomorrow. Imagine paying $69,000 for a 1953-S half dollar graded PCGS MS-66 with full bell lines, as someone did in January 2001. (Full bell lines refers to the design lines in the Liberty Bell that appear only on the very sharpest Franklin half dollars minted from 1948 to 1963 — poorly made examples have no, or only partial, bell lines.) What will happen to that person’s investment if an MS-67 full bell lines, or even another MS-66 full bell lines, shows up tomorrow? Think it can’t happen? Keep in mind that there was a time when no MS-66 full bell lines examples had yet been graded. And there are still thousands of ungraded 1953-S half dollars out there!

Collecting Finest Known world coins can be particularly treacherous because far fewer world coins have been submitted to grading services and, as far as we’ve seen, very little Condition Census research exists for world coins.

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