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The E-Sylum: Volume 13, Number 52, December 25, 2010, Article 5

MORE ON THE EARLIEST SPIRAL BOUND NUMISMATIC BOOK

Last week Dennis Tucker of Whitman Publishing asked:

I've heard it said (by J.T. Stanton) that The Cherrypickers' Guide, second edition, 1991, might have been the very first numismatic book to be published in spiral binding. Can an E-Sylum reader think of an earlier numismatic book issued in that format?

Joe Levine writes:

I have a copy of "Medals and Tokens of the Industrial Exhibition Association of Toronto" by Norman Wells that was spiral bound in 1975.

Joe Boling writes:

It depends on what you call spiral binding. If comb binding counts, then Howard Daniel's 1975 first edition of his Catalog and Guidebook of Southeast Asian Coins and Currency; V.1 French Colonial gets a nod, and Sten's Encyclopedia of World Paper Money: An Illustrated Guide-Index ...1661-1964 beats it by a decade, at 1965.

Ken Bressett writes:

I suspect that there were several early spiral bound numismatic books. One that comes immediately to mind (and was on a handy bookshelf) is “Auction Prices: United States Coins Third Edition”, published in 1944 by James B. Johnson. It has a stiff paper cover with a plastic coil binding.

I didn't have time to comment on the query last week, but I figured E-Sylum readers would be able to come up with multiple examples. This is the sort of record that inevitably gains qualifiers, such as "earliest non-privately-published spiral-bound numismatic book" or "first commercial print run spiral-bound numismatic book" -Editor

Ken Bressett adds:

Your comments about qualifying which kind of spiral binding came first caused me to do a little further searching. I hate pulling spiral books off the shelf because they never do go back in place the way they should, but this was a fun holiday project.

When I checked my second edition, 1991, of The Cherrypickers' Guide I found it is perfect bound! Perhaps there is another version somewhere, but I could not locate it. They began using a hidden spiral in 2006.

I did find a wire spiral edition of Edgar H. Adams' Plates of Lyman H. Low's Hard Times Tokens, published by Quarterman Publications in 1980.

An in-house publication called Casa de Moneda de Mexico was published by the Mexican Mint in 1991 with a wire spiral binding.

Something that I had forgotten was one of my own books, Collecting U.S. Coins, published in 1992 by Publications International. That could be one of the first commercial numismatic books with a wire spiral binding.

Whitman publications began using wire spirals with their 1997 edition of the Guide Book (in 1996).

An early plastic coil binding was used on a private publication called Kimmell's Analysis of Pioneer Gold in 1974.

The 1944 publication of Auction Prices: United States Coins by James B. Johnson, is the earliest that I have found that comes closest to your refined criteria.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see: QUERY: THE EARLIEST SPIRAL BOUND NUMISMATIC BOOK (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v13n51a12.html)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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