"Buy The Book" - CCF Wisdom

I don't have nearly as many reference books as I would like to have. And I want to make clear that I have shelves full of books, books in crates, books (to my shame) stacked on the floor… I don't dare count them, but I darkly suspect they number over a thousand. (Of course that's on all subjects : no more than about 50 are numismatic reference works, although some of those are spectacular.)

The Bavarian State Numismatic Collection has a library that occupies a corner of the Residenz, the old Royal Palace. Just going in there made me so happy.

Recently in another forum, I suggested to a new collector that in the beginning, he should spend at least as much on books as on coins. He replied, "What can I get from books that I can't get from the internet?"

I'm glad to learn that at least one soul has been saved!

Impressive library indeed!

My wife played a major role in my conversion. She bought me a copy of Les Petits Deniers de Flandre des XIIeme et XIIIeme Siecle by Ghyssens last year, when I started moaning about how I really should get some books on medieval Low Countries. Each time since, when I say "I really should consider getting "fill in the name" she has a screen pulled up on her computer within 5 minutes, asking me for a credit card number. So I got Van Gelder & Hoc (which covers 1433 - 1713 for the Burgundian and Spanish periods) and Delmonte's work on all the gold coins (not that I will be buying many, but I need for work over on the Numista catalog).

Fortunately for Low Countries, there are some 19th century works which are still often cited, and contain lots of historical context, and are now available in digitized form online: de Witte on Brabant (covering 1000 - 1795), de Pas on medieval Flanders, Van der Chijs on all the principalitiies of the north: Gelderland, Holland, Utrecht etc. though I know only a handful of words in DUtch, so it's a stuggle.

To that other collector's comment, yes, it's still possible to "reverse engineer" a lot of information starting from auction listings findable on the internet clearinghouses (acsearch, sixbid, and in my case the WCN archive), but it's a lot easier with the books.




I have access through a university library system, which I still have not fully exploited, but will be doing more.

And I was recently lucky to have been able to take advantage of an auction house library, but needed to travel all the way to Brussels (I won't be doing that vey often).

Looks very familiar to me.

I'm also eagerly awaiting MEC 7b.

I love all of Grierson's work, but Peter Spufford's Monetary Problems (which is his PhD thesis with a few edits) detailing coinage of the Low Countries remains unsurpassed; even Gelder-Hoc use it for their work. He was the ideal choice for this volume.

I emailed Alan Stahl around 2015 (after Peter's wife passed), and he was hopeful Peter would be freed up to continue editing MEC 7 soon; unfortunately, he too died a couple years later. (I don't see Alan's name on the MEC site anymore...)

The third contributor to MEC 7 is Serge Boffa, whose name I've never encountered, despite specializing in late 15th century Burgundy. It probably wouldn't hurt to reach out to him to inquire as to the status... this will probably be the most important book published in my lifetime (if it makes it to print!).

I don't know if 'buy the book before the coin' is good advice for a new collector anymore. Unless you have a clear idea of what you want to collect, you will quickly go bankrupt. The internet is a great way of getting a lot of information. Perhaps all of it, especially for fairly common coins. It's only when you start to get deeper and specialise that the internet becomes useless and you really need the book.

So, I think you did it in the right order - wait for curiosity to surpass frugality, when you know you're now serious about those coins and you need better support for more serious spending.

For a lot of the common stuff, the book is way too expensive (comparable to hundreds of the coins), and/or isn't actually all that helpful if you weren't interested in obscure minor details in the first place.
Even for the slightly more obscure areas of collecting, the book often costs dozens of times more than the coins (frequently rising in price nearly proportionally to the obscurity of the area).

There are admittedly some areas (much Islamic, some medieval Europe, I think a few others I don't recall offhand) where you have to get the book because there's almost nothing about it online, and/or what is online is very hard to use. In those areas the book (when it exists; sometimes it doesn't yet, and in those cases, good luck) also usually costs $$$$ and/or is almost unavailable.
For Islamic coinage in particular, the book also frequently requires skills that beginning collectors do not have; they would buy the book and it won't actually help because it assumes they already understand Arabic and/or already can read the legends.

The areas where it really helps to get the book before the coin are the ones where coins are expensive but well studied, especially if the coins are also commonly faked and/or hard to tell apart; this includes many US coinage series (especially in regard to minor varieties, such as VAMs on Morgan dollars), a bunch of the big-name Greek silver series (e.g. Athenian tetradrachms), most Roman gold (and much, but not all, Roman silver), almost all medieval English coinage, and probably many others I couldn't think of offhand (thalers come to mind).
But for the beginning collector who isn't necessarily interested in spending $200 (or even $100) on a coin, asking them to spend $200 (or more) on a book first probably isn't a good idea.