Break open the Slab on your ancient coin or not poll.

Was just wondering how many people here would keep their ancient coin in a slab or set it free.
There are many reasons for both sides as to your decision.
Please post your answer and give us your reasons.

 

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Easy, set it free. And the short answer, I like touching history.

 

It depends. There are coins that would have higher resale value if kept in their slabs -- Shekels of Tyre, Tribute pennies, Athenian owls, etc.

But I don't buy such coins. When I buy a slabbed coin, it's typically a modest third-century issue that is just as well off outside of its plastic prison. Not infrequently, the slabs are misattributed anyway.

So, I've taken every slabbed ancient I've ever purchased out of the slab.

 

Slabbed coins that are common, high grade and of no particular numismatic interest will sell better if left in the slab. Whether the coin deserves it or not, a slab with defects noted or lower than EF gains nothing in marketability so may as well be broken out and enjoyed. If you look at a coin in a slab and say that you would have graded the coin lower, you will be better off selling it to someone who buys labels rather than judging coins. The only slab I still have intact is a low end company and the label misidentifies the coin. These are not rare from the non-experts so it is not worth keeping except as a novelty.

 

I have one slabbed ancient coin - at one point, it was sold by Heritage, which is why it's in a slab, I assume. It's not of great value and I wouldn't have slabbed it (or any other coin). I haven't broken it out of the slab, because it seems like a waste, though it doesn't fit into my tray and languishes in a box!

ATB,
Aidan.

 

I am not a big fan of slabs. I really like that to hold ancient coins and do no harm, at least most of the time. This coin broke when I let someone hold it. She squeezed it between her fingers. Her expression was funny. Mine was not. A slab would have prevented that.

Some folks like slabs. That is ok with me. I see no value in having ancient coins slabbed, and will not pay to have someone tell me my coin is ok. I bought an owl in a slab and it is still there. I do respect the opinion of several of the folks who grade ancient coins like @Barry Murphy.

 

Likes others have said, if a slabbed coin is worth considerably more than a raw one, I'd leave it in the slab. Then I'd try to resell it for a grossly inflated price and use the windfall to get stuff I can touch.

But prices on slabs are so far outside of my budget that I have only this one - a Gordian III in an ICG slab for $13.88 off eBay. I've left it in because it makes me feel like a "serious" collector to have a slab. That being said, I'm not sure ICG slabs ancients any more, so I'm not sure this enhances the value much, if at all.



Gordian III Antoninianus
(243-244 A.D.)
Rome Mint
IMP GORDIANVS PIVS FEL AVG, radiate, cuirassed and draped bust right. / FORTVNA REDVX, Fortuna seated left holding rudder and cornucopia, wheel below throne.
RIC 144; RSC 98.
(? grams (ICG slab) / 23 mm)

 

I am not a fan of slabs at all. Be it modern or ancient. I only own 3 coins in slabs that were given away by PCGS and one that was sent in a trade.
I can see the point to having a coin in a slab if it were say a rare/highly counterfeited coin. Since I will never own any coins like that, I say "Crack em out"

 

I break 'em out because (a) I like to handle my coins and (b) I store my coins homogeneously in a manner to preserve provenance information.

Philosophically, I'm okay with encapsulation of ancient coins as a practice because it may help attract new collectors to the hobby. My issue with slabbing of ancient coins is information loss. Slab labels contain very limited information and any old tags or provenance information previously associated with the coin tend to get lost once a coin is encapsulated. Sometimes old tags include important research notes or provenance finds. Provenance information is occasionally listed on NGC labels, but rarely. This information is becoming critical to the continuation of our hobby.

Case in point: A few weeks ago, I bought an NGC encapsulated coin at auction. The "raw" coin had been sold about six months previously in an important, widely attended sale. The prior (6-months ago) sale catalogue included several important provenances for the coin back to the 1960s. None of those prior provenances were noted on the NGC label or in the recent auction listing. Had I not done the research, this information could easily have been lost.

Of course, third party grading companies can't be expected to research provenance - that's up to the submitter and unlikley to occur when bulk submissions are made for a large auction of coins. I wish these important details could be better protected. I understand that NGC will include on a label (in abbreviated fashion) certain verifiable provenance info provided to them. I have some provenances that would require full paragraphs to fully convey, and I wonder if any grading company could manage that.

David Vagi recently participated in an ANS "long table" discussion about slabbing. I very much wanted to join and raise my above issues with him. Unfortunately, the Zoom session was held in the middle of my work-from-home day.

 

I don't see why NGC or the like don't include at least a reference or two on the slab - it wouldn't take too much space. Perhaps any old tags or associated notes should be photographed and stored on the NGC website alongside the coin pictures, so some record would remain. I've kept every tag or envelope I've received, though at this stage matching them back to the right coin would take a while as I didn't file them properly (they're in a box and a large plastic bag).

ATB,
Aidan.

 

If it is already in a slab, I’d just leave it in the slab! The newer slabs let you see the edge better and it’s always free to unslab (and costs $$$, time and postal stress to slab). Slabs a bit of a bore to store sometimes.

That being said, I don’t think I would put an ancient into a slab myself...

 

They do sometimes include very abbreviated references, usually just the collector name (e.g. Ex Voirol, Ex Haeberlin), without giving an actual catalogue number or date. However, it's up to the submitter to give them this information. I'm not certain, but there may be additional fees for this, because putting the provenance on the label requires verification research by the encapsulating company.

 

I had not thought of that. I save only the 'old' tags/envelopes etc. from famous collections but not the flips from last week's owner. I assume that coins that came with tickets from big collections a hundred years ago are separated from them when slabbed with the old paper sent to the dump. I do not recall seeing a coin in slab accompanied by a separate envelope containing supporting documents even if the slab is one that is marked (e.g. Ex Voirol, Ex Haeberlin). I suppose it is a good question but there is considerable difference of opinion as to whether knowing the whereabouts of your coin over the last century is worth the trouble to maintain in hardcopy or if most 'Provenance' collectors are satisfied just to have the reference which they can assume to be correct or check as they wish. I believe this question came up here before and Barry Murphy gave us the rules for getting that extra line on NGC slabs but I don't recall the details. I will point out that most of the dozen or so coins in my collection that came with paper I considered worth saving were far from the finest coins either in condition or numismatic interest. Not every coin included in the best collections was a mint state gem. The ones that were not are more likely to end up in my collection. Do you pay extra for such documents or do you just maintain them as a novelty and try to pass them on to the next owner of the coin?

 

I've done both. I have only sent a handful of coins for slabbing. Most of the ones I have came to me that way.

I've cracked open slabs in cases where closer examination was necessary, I don't like the way the coin was mounted (such as reverse first), and if the information on the slab is just plain wrong. Ancient slabs are clunky and take up a lot of space.

Roma has a nifty holder that they use for the higher-end coin. It consists of a plastic frame with a mylar window, which is PVC-free. The frame can be opened and closed, allowing for removal of the coin. The holder is designed to fit in a small box. Of course the holder can be used separately, and a label can be taped on one side.

 

Writing about this issue has given me the idea for a product: a two-sided slab "case", holding the slab on one side and tags and paperwork on the other. Like a 2x2 flip, but bigger. I wonder if there would be a market for such a thing, or if such a thing already exists? Then again, if 73% of collectors of ancient coins are freeing their encapsulated coins, there may be a very limited market for such a product!

 

I have yet to purchase a slabbed coin. So there has been no need to crack one open for me. I think having the coin freely available to hold in the hand is one of the pleasures of collecting. In fact, I just use the 2x2 paper envelopes.

 

Well, I wouldn't say I've directly paid anything for documents such as pieces of paper but I have bought some coins based mostly on the provenance - a denarius from the Haeberlin Collection and a couple from the Duke Of Northumberland Collection, catalogued in 1856. These were far from the highlights of these collections and made their first sales appearances as parts of group lots.

I dug around in the big plastic bag to find a few representative pieces of paper that have come to me accompanying coins and that I will keep. I do need to sort them out better to preserve the connection with the coins and intend to do so, sometime.

Clockwise, from top left.

1. This came with a quinarius from a DNW group lot - there were two quinarii, Augustus RIC 1a & 1b, as it happens. This is a small cardboard holder with a cutout on the other side, on which someone has written the Cohen, Babelon, BMC and (probably) the old RIC numbers.

2. This came from Naville and included two CNG sales tags, the previous collector's envelope (RBW's) and a tag saying "Blom 84 29".

3. This came from Agora and consists of another RBW envelope and a Christian Blom tag from 1980. I paid less in 2016 than this coin cost in 1980.

4. From a fellow CoinTalker, an intriguing piece of tissue paper with the legend "T. Cederlind 8/16/95 $150 S.233a"



If I ever pass anything on to another collector, I'll be sure to pass on stuff like this too! Whether it's of much value is another question!

ATB,
Aidan.

 

I have never owned a slabbed coin and doubt I would ever buy one except with the express intention of taking it out. I can't afford the kind of coin that should really be kept in its slab (if it already has one) for economic/investment reasons. I hope never to have to sell my coins again, since I don't buy them for investment purposes. And if I ever am in the position again of having to sell, I will leave it to the buyer to slab them, with the understanding that the cost of having them slabbed would presumably be deducted from the purchase price. When I sold all of my more valuable British gold and silver coins and historical medals to Stack's Bowers on several occasions between two and six years ago --- as a series of direct sales rather than by auction, because I needed the money right away to pay my rent and bills, and couldn't wait the multiple months between consignment and receipt of proceeds, even though I was well aware that I was receiving less money by proceeding that way -- I knew that all of them would end up slabbed, but preferred not to think about it! Which is why I never even sought out the auction catalogues in which they ultimately appeared. Too painful. Plus I didn't really want to know how much money I really lost by not taking them through the auction process. The fact remains that I still ended up receiving more money than I had paid for everything, given how long I had owned most of what I sold. Even though Stack's paid me only about 35-40% of the then-retail value. Who knows how much more I would have gained had I sold the coins through auctioning them, after paying the fees and assigning a value to the time I would have had to wait?

By the way, out of all the (unslabbed) coins and medals I offered to Stack's -- totaling perhaps 150-200 individual items -- they didn't reject a single one, whether for reasons related to authenticity or for any other reason.

I recently expressed my opinion of slabbing on an aesthetic level in the Coin Storage thread, and might as well repeat what I said here, as somewhat intemperate as my comments may have been:

"To me, from an aesthetic viewpoint (wholly apart from the investment motives), slabbing coins is almost as pernicious. Once a coin is slabbed, in my opinion, it's no longer an actual coin. It's become a commodity. Like pork belly futures. Frankly, there might as well be a hologram inside the slab instead of a coin. Because all you're really seeing when you look at a slab is the image of a coin, mediated through plastic -- not terribly well, I think -- rather than the coin itself, which was intended to be seen directly, and to be experienced through the sense of touch as well as sight.

I expect that one of these days people will be slabbing rare first editions of books, making them impossible to read. (I've already seen that done with old magazines.) Or valuable paintings -- should all the Vermeers and Van Goghs and Rembrandts be graded by TPG's and encased in plastic slabs? Anyone who's ever been in a museum knows the vast difference between the experience of seeing a painting with and without glass in the frame -- the latter is incomparably superior, given that it allows the viewer to see the texture of the paint in all its three-dimensionality, an effect that's nearly destroyed when it's behind glass. Plastic is far worse than glass in detracting from the viewer's experience. Never mind that slabbing makes it physically impossible to display coins together in an appealing manner, as I have tried to do with my collection in its trays, as shown in some of the photos I've posted here.

Rant over -- I just get tired of the obnoxiousness of those who look down on ancient coin collectors who refuse to slab their coins. Even if I do understand the reasons why some do it."

And I didn't even mention some of the other practical problems with ancient coin slabs pointed out above, such as the almost complete absence of identifying information (catalog numbers, etc.) on the slabs, and the many mistakes in the identifying information that certain companies do provide on their slabs.

Also, I have recently looked several times through the ancient coins for sale on Ebay, and have noticed that the percentage of slabbed coins among them is far higher than on VCoins or Ma-Shops -- presumably because of the assurance of authenticity that slabbing supposedly provides. However, I have become convinced that many Ebay sellers exploit slabbing as a way of knowingly attempting to deceive naive buyers into paying far more than the actual fair market value for common Roman coins in average condition. The prices asked are often preposterously, laughably high. I understand that a slab can justifiably attach a certain premium to an ancient coin because of the assurance of authenticity it supposedly provides. But not a premium of 5x or 10x fair market value. And I wonder if the slabbing companies, when they slab common coins for such sellers, are aware that they're participating in such deceptive practices.

 

I keep all the coin tags that come with my coins, usually inside their coin flips (which I keep in a box). For the last year or so, I've been stapling the old coin tags, inside their coin flips, to the relevant invoices or printed-out coin descriptions, which I keep in a 3-ring binder. That way I can find them easily if I want to.

 

I think a slab would definitely increase the value of a coin. Why? Simple, more people would be interested in something that has been authenticated by an expert and the novices like me would also buy a coin they would not otherwise dare to.

Can anyone be 100% sure that a coin is genuine simply by looking at photos. I bet no one (even on this forum) can say that they can. Also while a lower end coin’s value might not be damaged significantly, imagine a softer metal (gold) ancient in a slab without a scratch and one removed and subsequent scratched. Why take the risk?

I have a few which are not slabbed but the ones I find expensive, at least for my modest budget, are always slabbed and shall remain so.

Now I will duck for cover while the contra opinions flow