John Spring: Ancient Coin Auction Catalogues 1880-1980, just published September 2009, 374 pages, A4, illustrated throughout with portraits of the cataloguers and photographs of the locales in which the major auction houses worked, 886 catalogues from England, the continent and the United States listed and described physically even down to the detail of plate content, white laminated boards.

The parameters the author set out were to begin with 1880 with the first use of photographic plates, and include each catalogue through 1914 that included a single plate of ancients. That was increased to two plates through 1945 and five plates thereafter. The census was stopped after 1980 with the proliferation of dealers.