BOOK REVIEWS: ANCIENT COIN BOOKS

The best advice this or any other coin collector ever got is, “Buy the book before you buy the coin.”

For beginning collectors of early and modern American coins, the choice of reference books is simple. If you have The Official Red Book®, you’re probably good to go. With 463 compact pages of comprehensive, reliable information — at a list price of just $17.95, the Red Book is a no-brainer.

Collectors of ancient coins face a more daunting task.

Ancient coins come in tens of thousands of types, with hundreds of “issuing authorities” (empires, cities, tribes, and rulers) and the books that document all this information represent centuries of accumulated scholarship — not all of it in English. Ancient coin books can be costly, and hard to find.

In general terms, ancient coins fall into two broad categories: Roman and “Greek.” For convenience, coins issued by many peoples who spoke Semitic, Celtic, Central Asian and other languages are lumped into the “Greek” category.

CoinWeek asked me to recommend five books that might make up a beginner’s reference library for classical numismatics. But as J.R.R. Tolkien used to say, the tale grew in the telling…

If you’re not quite sure where to start, the best first choice is Ancient Coin Collecting by Wayne Sayles. With a list price of about $22, the second edition delivers 312 pages of solid advice, with over 300 photographs and many charts and tables. As one reviewer noted, “I wish I had this book twenty years ago when I began collecting.” Other titles by the same author cover Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and other coins, plus Classical Deception, the best non-technical book on counterfeit ancients. If these are the only ancient coin books you ever buy, you will be glad you did.

To read the complete article, see:
Ancient Coin Books: A Collector’s Reference Library for Classical Numismatics (https://coinweek.com/recent-articles-video/ancient-coin-books-a-collectors-reference-library-for-classical-numismatics/)

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