Old Reference Material: Better Than The New?

Newly discovered die varieties, RPMs, etc need to be added to reference works to keep them accurate and up to date.

There are a couple of distinct types of information found in reference books.

historical, I think many of the older publications do a much better job on this aspect.

technical, I think that the modern reference materials are very much more informative on this aspect, especially since errors and varieties are a fairly new trend for the collector.

Thanks for the input, everyone!

Yes, it is so true that older works cannot possibly have up-to-date values listed for coins, and that (especially in the case of ancients) sometimes coins reported in old works to be rare are later found in great quantities in a hoard. But it seems that there are so many older works, especially those from, say the 19th century, that really focus upon the historical context. In a sense it seems that, as just carl stated, many newer works treat coins more as a commodity by abbreviating their context as much as possible and merely stating the price and believed rarity. For instance, books such as Riddell's "Monograph of the Silver Dollar" just strike me as works that truly tried to contribute to the body of knowledge in that area of numismatics, whereas it seems that most modern works (excluding some articles published by the ANS) just restate what has been previously published.

For this very reason I am quite happy to see that many publishers that focus upon the reprinting of old works that are in the public domain have begun to reissue many relating to coins. (Though many of these can also be found on google books)

These presses include Kessinger Publishing, BiblioLife, BiblioBazaar, Cornell University Library Press, and others.