James L. Halperin

James L. Halperin is an American businessman and author, who is the co-founder and co-chairman of Heritage Auctions, now the largest American auction house with 2024 sales in excess of $1.867 billion. In 1985 Halperin authored a text on grading coins, How to Grade U.S. Coins, upon which the grading standards of the grading services PCGS and NGC were ultimately based. He is the author of two futurist fiction books, The Truth Machine (1996) and The First Immortal (1997), which were in 2001 both chosen by PC Magazine in a survey put out to their online newsletter subscribers, as possible responses for the top 17 science/technology fiction books of the previous 20 years. In the 1980s he and his businesses were investigated by federal agencies, which investigation was settled by signing consent decrees and agreeing to pay a substantial fine.