seeking knowledge for british coins

There are several options. The most widely quoted is probably the catalogue put out by Spink, Coins of England and the United Kingdom. It covers the entire 2100-year spectrum of English coinage: Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Vikings, Normans, English hammered and English/British moderns.

Becoming more popular, and especially useful if the ancients and mediaevals aren't your thing, are the Rotographic books. Collectors' Coins GB is their main British catalogue. It's cheaper, but smaller and generally less informative as far as background stories go.

For general information on the series, there are websites. Tony Clayton's website is often near the top of Google searches, for good reason: it's been around for ages and has lots of good basic info on British coins.


Besides the usual date sets and type sets, the sheer breadth of English/British coinage allows for other different kinds of collections to form. The coins of Queen Victoria and her son Edward VII are often considered the high point of British coin design, and collecting a type set is not too expensive. An alternative method is collecting "one from each monarch". Early hammered coins were struck at a multitude of mints and some try for a "one from each mint-city" collection.


I don't know about Dansco, but Whitman made (but as far as I know, no longer makes) push-in albums for Britain and several other British Commonwealth countries. But it's my understanding that "set collectors" aren't as common in Britain as they are in the USA, so there's little local demand for set albums. The only "set albums" you're likely to encounter from anywhere in Europe are for the euro coins.

Hope this helps.

Thanks y'all. Looks like this is plenty to get me started.

The vogue for Whitman and similar date folders rather died in the UK in 1971, with the introduction of decimla currency. In the 1960s, it was common to be able to find coins a century old in your small change, especially the bronze pennies and halfpennies; you could even occasionally find 'silver' coins that contained real silver (925 fine up to 1920 date and 500 fine from 1921 to 1946, thereafter cupro-nickel).

Collecting coins from pocket change and building date runs was a then popular pastime and there was always the hope that something fabulous might be found - the only known example of the 1952 halfcrown was found in circulation! Serious collectors then, as now, tended to store their coins in wooden cabinets or non-acidic paper envelopes, rather than in cardboard folders. Chris Wren