1 Book 2 Book - Red Book Blue Book

Thank you Spence! Now I feel better -

The prices is both are actually not terrible, are they 100% accurate? Not really but they are in the ball park. Use them as a guide, something like grey sheet is a better bet for dealer pricing but grey sheet is expensive.

Interesting bits of information. Thanks.

Take everything you read on the internet with a grain of salt, who is the author, what is the source?

Something like the red book/blue book are written by professionals and vetted by an editorial staff. I would trust the red/blue book more than a random person on the internet.

JennyCents, you're right. Physical books are getting to be an inconvenience. Although I have copies of the Krause manuals for my world coins, it's so much easier to look up information on Numista. And that goes the same for the Red Book too. And I can't drag around every possible book with me to shows and meeting. But my phone can easily access that information online.

As for the Blue Book, it just so happens that I won a copy of the 2026 - 83rd Edition in our coin club's raffle this week. Here's what it says about the prices in it:

The books were both originally intended for use by coin dealers; the Blue Book was wholesale price - the price a dealer would reasonably pay you to buy the coin. The Red Book was retail prices - the price a dealer would reasonably offer the coin for sale at. The difference in price between Blue and Red would be the dealer's reasonable profit margin.

Historically, the books were used to provide an authoritative, neutral point of view about the dealer's buy and sell prices. If someone came into the shop and asked how much would the dealer give for Coin X, the dealer could point to Coin X in the Blue Book and say "that's how much". The book says it, can't argue with the book. Likewise, if someone questioned "why is Coin X in your cabinet display being sold for that price", the dealer could pick up the Red Book and point to the Coin X entry there.

The books are somewhat anachronistic today, being that they date from a time when coin price information didn't change all that much over the course of a year; the concept certainly predates the rapid movement in precious metal prices we see in the modern world. Prices in the books are also a "best guess" by the writers as to where prices might be in the future, since the books (again, historically) take some time between data collation and actually getting printed. The authors are humans, not prophets; sometimes they guess wrong.

Are they still used? Well, for smaller dealers probably. They're also a handy guide for overall price rises; if the Red Book prices in a certain series have all gone up 5% since the previous year, then bumping your ticket prices by 5% would be a reasonable action.

The books also offer some kind of grounding in reality for someone relying wholly on past online sales for accurate pricing. If the top 5 ebay sales for a certain coin all say it's worth $2499, and the Red and/or Blue Books say it's worth 25 cents, then it's safe to conclude those ebay sales are scams.