What " Official" Has This Catalogue?

A marketing ploy, muck like 'industry standard'.

WOW! I haven't seen one of these since the mid 70's. I didn't even know it was published anymore. When I started collecting in the early 1970's I somehow found the then current edition of this guidebook. I loved it and preferred it over the
RedBook, I think it had to do with the size of it and the shortness of the articles. I didn't know what I was doing back then. Now that I think about it I'm sure the "official" part of the title is to convince tweenage boys that are starting to collect coins that they have something important.

Yes, I was really that ignorant.

I really do object to these sorts of verbal shenanigans. "Official" has a meaning:


You'll see the core of each subdefinition of "official" is the phrase "authority or public body". There are "authorities" for coin issuing but there is no such "authority" for coin collecting. There is no US Government Department of Numismatics, no United Nations Secretariat of Collectables that would have the "authority" to declare a coin catalogue to be "official". There are numismatic associations such as the ANA, but they have very loose controls over the terminology and are in no position to grant "officialness" to anything numismatic, since no-one is forced or heavily obliged to become an ANA member if they want to be a coin collector.

Yet the advertising industry in America seems to have turned it into yet another meaningless weasel-word you can slap onto your product in the hope that it sells more stuff. I can only assume that there was some law case years ago that ruled that, in the absence of an actual government authority or professional organization on a subject, anyone had the right to declare themselves an authority and call themselves "official".

It kind of goes like this "I authorized the publishing of this book, that makes me the authority, so it is Official."