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Posted 06/18/2023 10:56 am
Quote:
I don't know if 'buy the book before the coin' is good advice for a new collector anymore. Unless you have a clear idea of what you want to collect, you will quickly go bankrupt. The internet is a great way of getting a lot of information. Perhaps all of it, especially for fairly common coins. It's only when you start to get deeper and specialise that the internet becomes useless and you really need the book.
So, I think you did it in the right order - wait for curiosity to surpass frugality, when you know you're now serious about those coins and you need better support for more serious spending.
I don't know if 'buy the book before the coin' is good advice for a new collector anymore. Unless you have a clear idea of what you want to collect, you will quickly go bankrupt. The internet is a great way of getting a lot of information. Perhaps all of it, especially for fairly common coins. It's only when you start to get deeper and specialise that the internet becomes useless and you really need the book.
So, I think you did it in the right order - wait for curiosity to surpass frugality, when you know you're now serious about those coins and you need better support for more serious spending.
For a lot of the common stuff, the book is way too expensive (comparable to hundreds of the coins), and/or isn't actually all that helpful if you weren't interested in obscure minor details in the first place.
Even for the slightly more obscure areas of collecting, the book often costs dozens of times more than the coins (frequently rising in price nearly proportionally to the obscurity of the area).
There are admittedly some areas (much Islamic, some medieval Europe, I think a few others I don't recall offhand) where you have to get the book because there's almost nothing about it online, and/or what is online is very hard to use. In those areas the book (when it exists; sometimes it doesn't yet, and in those cases, good luck) also usually costs $$$$ and/or is almost unavailable.
For Islamic coinage in particular, the book also frequently requires skills that beginning collectors do not have; they would buy the book and it won't actually help because it assumes they already understand Arabic and/or already can read the legends.
The areas where it really helps to get the book before the coin are the ones where coins are expensive but well studied, especially if the coins are also commonly faked and/or hard to tell apart; this includes many US coinage series (especially in regard to minor varieties, such as VAMs on Morgan dollars), a bunch of the big-name Greek silver series (e.g. Athenian tetradrachms), most Roman gold (and much, but not all, Roman silver), almost all medieval English coinage, and probably many others I couldn't think of offhand (thalers come to mind).
But for the beginning collector who isn't necessarily interested in spending $200 (or even $100) on a coin, asking them to spend $200 (or more) on a book first probably isn't a good idea.
