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?

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

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.

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.

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.