"Due to the omnipresence of The Standard Catalog of World Coins, in its many guises, all of the issues in this booklet are tied to KM numbers where possible. As the Krause series of books is now the world standard it would have been a disservice to collectors to do otherwise. The KM catalog numbers from that series of books are now used throughout the world by collectors from most countries. Those catalogs are available from the publisher, Krause Publications in Iola, WI USA or from many dealers that specialize in world coinage"

would like to differ. Schoen's Welt Munzkatalog is now a superior publication than SCWC for ultra-modern coins. In case of any difference, I prefer to base my opinion on WMK, rather than SCWC. In last few years, WMK has improved a lot under new editor, Gerhard whereas SCWC has shown a fast decline during the same period. The opinion is based on my personal usage and I wanted to share it with my fellow numismatists who are into ultra-modern coins.

Your reader makes some valid points but when all is said and done most dealer price lists that I receive use KM numbers and other than a German (or at least European) price list I am not sure if I have seen a price list in recent years that has Schoen numbers.

The comment about "ultra-modern coins" kinda destroys the reader's argument. It is kinda like saying Seppa's 1972 coin catalog is referred to by more collectors of Ecuadorian coins than either SCWC or WMH and therefore is the leading catalog in the world. In other words, I suspect that collectors of solely "ultra-modern coins" are few and far between when looked at as a percentage of world coin collectors.

My understanding is that under corporate ownership SCWC and its ilk have suffered greatly in circulation and in the number of personnel used for updating, etc. However, I think if the reader goes into five or so public libraries and checks the books on the shelves his/her opinion will change.

That said, I thank the reader because with a publication with very limited potential circulation it is great to see that someone is willing to contest my views on anything.

The old edition is the red one which I currently have. The green one is just out and I should have it by month end.

Yes, when I say better book, I restrict myself to ultra-modern coins, which is my area of work. As a matter of fact, neither SCWC nor WMK is directly of any real use in ultra-modern numismatics.

By definition, the coin is no longer ultra-modern since it becomes just modern, once it is catalogued and assigned a reference number. It is in this area especially where WMK excels. For collectors of ultra-modern coins, SCWC may be considered good since it fails to assign a catalog number for many years, thus helping them to call their collection ultra-modern but then that certainly should not be the objective of the catalog.

This is new series of Bangladesh circulation coins. The first of these, 1 Taka, was issued in July 2010 and became commonly available in circulation by first half of 2011. You can see when they got listed in either of the catalogs, yourself. For ultra-modern coins, the best site is www.worldcoinnews.blogspot.com which is maintained by David from Bilbao, Spain.