The author is Will Nipper, a C4 Member. I believe that Will started this work years ago as a personal reference, organizing his notes and research into an accessible format. It then got to be so large that he decided to publish it - not for wealth or fame, but more to leave a legacy for his children so that they will know more about his hobby interest.

He has accumulated a lot of colonial and early federal history, along with the coins in commerce circulating during those periods. This has as much history as it has information about the coins. This is not a C4 publication and has not been edited by our editors. It is a summary of Will's research and personal observations. He published this privately.

It is about 560 pages including the index and endnotes, hardcover with a very attractive glossy dust jacket. The dust jacket has beautifully taken and printed images, as opposed to the low res image on the website. The paper for the pages is a nice quality, but I don't know what it's called.

This book would be appreciated by a novice entering the field of colonial coinage, as well as the advanced collector looking for information about the series he specializes in. I do plan to purchase a second unautographed copy that I can make notes in. When I do obtain a nice autographed copy of a book, I like to keep it clean of my chicken scratch.

On that website, the final paragraph of the preface seems to accurately sum up the book.

In Yankee Doodle's Pocket is intended to split the difference between numismatics and history. It even might be described as a "whodunit" or, more honestly, as a love story.

If I have succeeded then neither hardcore historians nor serious numismatists are likely to be fully satisfied.

Ray is pretty accurate in describing the book. It actually is about 576 pages (including index, bibliography and end notes) and covers the period up to 1840, for reasons described in the preface. It basically describes anything used as money during the period -- including barter items, paper money, foreign coins and tokens, US Mint issues, hard times tokens, etc, and, yes, "colonials." It's a narrative rather than a reference book. That is, it's intended to be read.

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