How Did You Guys Do Coin Research Before The Internet?

Here you have to go quite far back... because "coin catalogues" go back nearly as far as coin collecting itself.

We have never found any evidence of a contemporary ancient Greek or Roman coin catalogue - indeed, in an age when a single silver coin could be a day's wage for a skilled labourer, "coin collecting" was largely an affectation of the idle rich; what evidence we have of coin collectors back then is patchy, and the "collectors" of that age seemed to be more akin to Victorian-age antiquarians: collecting the odd and curious things that came their way, but with no sense of "completing a set" or systematic one-from-every-city collecting. And in an age when owning a coin from a discredited or rival emperor could earn you a death sentence, coin collecting could be a dangerous hobby to indulge in.

In ancient China, where coin production and use goes back as far or further than in the West, he have more documentation of coins. Since a typical Chinese bronze coin was (generally) worth a lower value than a typical Western silver coin, coin collecting was more affordable in ancient China, and more people seem to have done it. The earliest surviving Chinese coin catalogue was written by a fellow named Hong Zun, who lived circa 1120—1174, at the height of the Song Dynasty - a period where interest in history and in coin collecting seems to have been quite high, given the number of "sets made for collectors to collect" coin series which the Chinese mints issued at the time. Yet Hong Zun also seems to quote from even earlier catalogues and books, which are now lost - including, apparently, a catalogue written by Sui Dynasty scholar Liu Qian (AD 484—550).

In the West, "coin collecting" took off as a "hobby of kings" with the influence of Petrarch (1304-1374), initiator of the Renaissance, who observed that studying the ways of the ancients through their writings and coins could teach a prince how to rule their society better. By the time of the invention of the printing press, coin catalogues for specific collections would have begun to be compiled, though parochialism would have meant that there was minimal effort to compile and collate the catalogues of every collection to try to attain something comprehensive. By the 1700s, cataloguing of the major and most common types of both "modern" and "ancient" coins would have been available, though still very patchy and incomplete by modern standards. Auction catalogues from collections that were sold off provide a good counterpoint to the catalogues of government-held and museum collections. "Regional" catalogues began to be compiled in the mid-1800s, such as Marsden's catalogue of "Oriental Coins" (Asia and the Middle East), dating from 1823 and of which I have a 1977 reprint. However, a "generic" coin collector would have to wait until the 20th century before anything resembling a "world coin catalogue" would appear.