Speaking Of Number Of Countries...

That is a great way of putting it Wade, "coin issuing entities". I like it.

i forgot to mention, I also count each currency changeover (ie sterling to decimal etc) as a new "entity". my one from each "country" collection includes 2 from england, 2 from australia etc, but I haven't started with euros yet.

All-
Interesting comments... I appreciate your level of historical detail, platinrubel, though it would be unfeasible to consistently apply to my collection- I have approximately 217 "countries", and as an example just one of them, Brazil, has four "political entities" (Portuguese Colony, United Kingdom, Empire and Republic) and 11 "coinage series". Still, it would be nice to have a compiled source for more of the historical data you mention. I've adapted the bare-bones information presented in the Krause catalogs, though their descriptors are not always consistent or intelligible- probably due to different editors working on different sections at different times. For example, for my rank of "political entity", they use British Colony, British Protectorate, British Caribbean Territories, British Dependency, British Commonwealth, Constitutional Monarchy within the Commonwealth, etc, all of which reflect some sort of political reality, though I'm not at all convinced Krause applies the terms consistently.

The concept of naming the coinage series after the names of the currency is an interesting one. Again, I've arbitrarily used Krause's descriptors in most cases, though I'm not sure what the functional difference (if any!) is between "standard" coinage vs. "circulation" coinage or between Australia's "sterling" coinage vs. British West Africa's "pound" coinage vs. Great Britain's "pre-decimal" coinage vs. Jersey's "standard" coinage, etc. I'm not sure if there are real historical/monetary distinctions here, or the editors are just being sloppy- probably a little of both.

The Brazilian Republic mentioned above has gone through seven different coinage reforms since retiring their "standard" coinage in the late 1930's. In three out of the seven reforms the denominations were in centavos and cruzieros, making them rather confusing to refer to by their currency. Instead, I've simply numbered them in chronological order: reform I, reform II, reform III, etc. etc.

I've probably gone on long enough about this, but I thought I would post a semi-random page from one of my binders to illustrate how I label and arrange my countries, entities, and coinage series:



"Country" is on the top of the label, the "political entity" is in brackets and the "coinage series" is third. I also put the date range of the mintage years of the coinage series, not its political lifespan (that is, what is the earliest and latest date I would find on a coin from that series). The triple triangles on the first label denotes the first entity and coinage series for a given country.

cheers,
tbg

Very neat and organized there, tbg. But I have to say, for me personally, I'd tire of constantly moving the little card-tags whenever I got a few too many new coins from country X.

As for the whole "political entity" and "coinage series" labels which Krause uses, I'd agree they're a bit of a joke. Particularly the way the labels carry across several volumes, where the distinction that may have been helpful in, say, the 1700s Krause is no longer needed in the 2000s Krause. The "Kingdom resumed" subtitle under Great Britain comes to mind; this is a legacy of the 1600s Krause, when Britain was briefly a Republic (1649-1660). "Standard" coinage usually refers to normally struck circulation coins, as opposed to "countermarked coinage", "emergency coinage", "token coinage", "trade coinage" or something similar that may have been issued in the 1800s or earlier.

I can only recommend you the german standard cataloges: but they have not been published in english.

http://www.gietl-verlag.de/blaetter...og/index.php
http://www.gietl-verlag.de/blaetter...og/index.php

for germany, it is better as following:
1.holy roman empire (middel ages - 1806)
2: German states (1806-1918)
3: German Empire (1871-1918)

4: Austrian Empire (1806-1918)

and then the time after the end of monarchies, which is simple. (weimar, IIIrd Reich, Saar, GDR, BRD,...)
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This includes also the coinage of (parts of)countries, which today are existing as poland, slowakia, italy, france, switzerland, belgium, the netherlands, romania, balkans. and further: mexico (maximilian), greek (otto of bavaria)

@bacchus"2:
of course it is a greek and not a german coin, but you can also collect them as a bavarian dependency, though it is not bavaria or an bavarian area.
it´s ofcourse also the same with the mexican coins of emperor maximilian.