Books On Roman Coins

I never seem to have enough reference books. Would love to have a copy of each you listed.

Impossible to find at barnes and noble and I can never find the ISBN's for anything. Fustrating to say the least.

Thanks for your effort Warren.

Perfect info for where I am at. Bookmarked!!

-Kurt

I regularly come out on the side against books, it seems. It is not that I don't appreciate books, it is just that many beginners seem to insist on buying the wrong books. Warren's guide here is a great service IMHO and points out such things as the change of worthiness of the Van Meter book caused by the market price. I gave the book a good review (good for me - I am hard on authors) when the book was $35 new and cheaper used but would never pay some of the prices asked recently. One reason is that Van Meter was cheaply produced and came unbound easily making many used copies a bit trashy. Books of the 1930's are often printed on high acid paper that is not standing up well to the test of time. I remember the Mouchmov book on the Reka Devnia hoard was expensive before Barry Murphy reprinted it partly because several of the existing copies were too brittle to handle. Then there is the question of being outdated: Just because the coins are old does not mean that our understanding of them is long term. Some old books are just plain misleading. Others were bad the day they were issued. The Hill book on Septimius Severus always struck me as a fantasy more than a scholarly overview.

Many old books have been reprinted but often the reproduction quality of the originally marginal photos drops to abysmal. For that matter the photos on earlier books were usually made from plaster casts rather than from the coins themselves and this process offered variable results (often better than the results from actual coins in those days but still not up to modern standards. When Victor Failmezger asked me to do the photos for his book I agreed on the condition that we also include a CD with the images in the book. I thought at the time that the idea would catch on and be copied by all later coin books. It turned out nobody cared and later printings went without the CD. I suspect that CD (a labeled original) will be a great rarity someday since most of them got thrown out.

I felt guilty reading Warren's review since it mentioned about ten books I do not have. I agree with most of what he said but am personally a bit harder on all "...and their Values" type catalogs and easier on non catalogs even if they lack photos (reverse or any). Perhaps my favorite coin books are not books at all but old sales catalogs by high end houses (CNG and better) where the seller takes the trouble to explain what is special about that coin and why we should pay through the nose to own it. My library is not as large as Warren's but I suspect some of the big sellers have him challenged if not surpassed. On the other hand my 20-30 boxes of old catalogs (a small collection) are hard to use when you want to find a specific coin. Enter the savior known as online indexed catalogs (acsearch.com and others). When/if all those back catalogs get indexed in a searchable database I will offer all my old paper for recycling. That probably will not come in my lifetime.

Finally there is the question of books that are collectible for their own being rather than the information they contain. I have a couple. One, shown below, cost $10 at a used book store. That figure exceeds its information value but sells well short of the beauty of its fold out plates (not all old drawings are this well done!). I would never pay the going rates for a 1752 coin book but will buy any others that show up like this one did. Everyone shoud see one like this printed on really good paper (fully as flexible as the day it was made) or before the time that bookmakers cut every corner they could to boost profits.

Use Warren's list and buy the right book for you.

Woof

Here's a link to the BMC Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian on google books. Lots of pictures and free to read.

http://books.google.com/books?id=th...CF4Q6AEwBzgK

John