Collector Finds Rare NGC Holder at Local Coin Show

By Hubert Walker for CoinWeek ….
 

A collector interested in old NGC coin holders made a rare discovery recently when he bought a 1958 Roosevelt Dime at a Delaware coin show.

Daniel Sassa, a 42-year-old from New Jersey, attended the January 16-18 Wilmington Coin Club Show in New Castle with a friend, on the lookout for “pre-barcode NGC slabbed coins.” Toward the end of their visit, Sassa approached a certain dealer’s table. Once he informed the dealer of his particular interest, the dealer remembered two coins he had in a back case – one of which was the dime, graded MS67. Sassa realized right away that the coin was in a Gen 2.0 white core white label holder, which was exactly the kind of collectible that gets the slab specialist excited.

But after examining it further, that excitement turned to amazement.

“Sold” on buying it on the spot, Sassa asked how much the dealer wanted for it, and the dealer asked Sassa to make him an offer. Looking closely at the coin to determine how much that would be, he noticed that the gold embossed NGC logo was printed on the inside of the core and not on the exterior plastic surface of the holder. This meant that he had discovered a rare and valuable Gen 2.1 NGC slab, something he knew how to recognize after inheriting his grandfather’s NGC-certified coins at the age of 13 and spending almost 10 years studying “fatties” and other older-generation NGC holders.

“I was fortunate to find this one,” Sassa said. “I highly doubt I will ever find another again in such a coin show setting in my life.”

Another intriguing aspect of Sassa’s find is the grade. Both major third-party grading services were far more conservative with the grades they assigned when this silver Roosevelt Dime was certified, so finding an MS67 on such an old holder–even for a common coin like this–is special.

What Is the Rare Gen 2.1 NGC Holder?

Founded in 1987, NGC’s first generation (Gen 1.0) of holder had an eye-catching black core coupled with an embossed silver NGC logo on the front and small, black sans-serif printing on a sparse white label on the back. The grading service used it from September to November of that year, and only about 60 are known today.

At the end of November, beginning of December 1987, the company switched to a white core and white label with a gold logo for the second generation. But there was a problem. The logo was smeared on around half of the slabs during stamping, making them unusable. NGC ceased production of the new holder after only five days, opting to put the logo on the outside going forward.

Slabs with the correctly printed gold logo on the core became known as Gen 2.1 to differentiate them from the revised Gen 2.0 and 3.0 designs, even though, technically, they came first.

Because it was in production for only one business week, the Gen 2.1 holder is known as the second-rarest slab – though it might be rarer than surviving Gen 1.0 holders. Collectors estimate that NGC encapsulated between 1,000 to 3,000 coins in this specific slab, but after decades of back-and-forth crackouts and crossovers in the rare coin grading industry, it is currently unknown just how many 2.1 holders are still out there. Serious attempts at a census began only a few years ago.

NGC introduced barcodes on their inserts with Gen 5.0 in 1993.

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Sources

https://www.ngccoin.com/about/evolution-of-ngc-holder/

https://coins.www.collectors-society.com/wcm/CoinView.aspx?sc=709429

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