Coins Books

Unable to review as after a month has gone by I am still waiting for the delivery of the book.Why on earth cant you send orders by airmail.

This catalog is just a list of the coins with their Arabic inscriptions. There are no photos or line drawings. If you have an Arabic coin you wish to attribute, this book is of virtually no use. Unfortunately, the useful books, such as Mitchner's World of Islam, with its many photographs, are expensive.

The album arrived factory sealed and looked great like all my Dansco albums do. Inside the album however was another story. The third page was missing and replaced with a duplicate fifth page. It looks like a quality control issue. I contacted the seller several times but only seem to get the run-around. Wrote an e-mail to Dansco with my problem and haven't heard back from them. This is the only time that I had a problem with buying something on Amazon and I still hope that someone makes good on this product.

The original imprint is from not just last century but the century before that. Thomas speculates on the meanings of inscriptions that have subsequently been translated. Sadly this book remains only as a testament to the scholarship of the period and adds little to our knowledge of the Sasanians.

If you're purchasing this book to price your coins--don't. All coin photos (black and white) are in the back of the book. You then have to page through to find the reference number that corresponds to it; which brings you to some useless information. Finally, you'll resort to the index (between useless information and photo's) in hopes that it might shed some light on...anything. It's doesn't. This book is poorly put together. I reluctantly give it a star.

Well.. the book is 17 years old...has many pretty pictures. Price guide is so far out of date is it unusable. Cant take in to account the Ebay factor w/prices...(SUPPLY -VS- DEMAND.) In short it is like comic book..Not really useful info; just FLUFF . Some nice pics...should be priced at 5.99 NOT - $20. Not useful to collector OR DEALER as its more of a show and tell book, w/ verY little tell. Would not recommend, unless you want to look at the pretty pics of items most of us have seen before...thats all that is in the book . NOT GOOD FOR A REFERENCE GUIDE -
:(

I think the book is good value for an absolute novice with a Sunday morning to kill. The book is a tiny one in terms of pages. Being a reprint of a book that was printed over a hundred years ago, you have sketches of coins to look at. Overall it's a quick read but information wise it falls short - I mean way way short. I do find reading the views of a coin enthusiast from many years ago interesting. If you know about Pridmore, the Krause catalog etc, I doubt you'll want to read this book.

This book published in 2000 August in conjunction with the 50th Anniversary of the Central Bank was written by an archivist and historian who admits in Preface that he is neither a numismatist nor a notaphilist.. This fact is clearly reflected in the errors and omissions through-out the text. This book clearly requires very significant re-editing and correction and careful proof reading by an expert numismatist on Lankan Coins.

The only positive feature is the layout of the book, particularly the inclusion of images among the text which makes the presentation much better than typical books numismatic books like Codrington which uses plates at the end of the book.

Starting with the illustration used for the cover of the book, this is very poor ans misleading since it pretends to be a mosaic of Lankan coins and currency, but all of the items are to widely different scales. It reflects the same error made in the images in the book which have been printed to different scales often with no indication that the coin is not to scale or it's actual size.

The newsprint (85 dots per inch) quality of the grayscale coin and currency images makes them not attractive since no detail is visible. In some cases it is apparent that printed images of coins have been poorly scanned without de-screen leading to the very ugly patterns such seen on page 91. The Art magazine (175 dots per inch) quality as used for the color currency images should have been used, although engraving such as used in the 1924 edition of Codrington is what is ideal.

The color images of the currency is nice quality printing. However it is a pity that the word SPECIMEN and the punch holes used to deface the currency notes covers so much of the design, that makes them very non-attractive. The non-engraved printing is surely sufficient defacement of the currency notes for security purposes. The much better choice would have been to use a fixed smaller scale such as say 70% or even 40% as used in the Pick standard catalog of currency published by Krause.

A brief chapter on the "Beginnings of Currency and some early coinages" is outside the book title description also since this is too vast a field to even summarize in 4-pages.
On the other hand there is only a very incomplete discussion of Foreign coins used on the island which is far more important to include in the this chapter on Beginnings of coinage in the island.

It is important to also illustrate all of the different types of notes and coins not a random selection with some duplication of the same images for some types. Table-2 which maybe interesting for Ancient coinage is meaningless for modern or even medieval coins. There are many errors in the table entries under British era, reflecting the errors in the text.

(...)

Just because a book is being written for children, that doesn't make it all right to do a sloppy job with it. This book contains wrong and misleading information, and the photographs are poorly selected.
A sentence on p. 6 reads, "The main mint is in Washington, D.C." This is totally wrong. There is, in fact, NO mint in Washington, D.C. Any moderately serious coin collector knows this. Thus, it is immediately obvious that this book was neither written nor checked by anyone with any real knowledge on the subject.
Although the book explains that coins are stamped from dies, there is not a single picture of a die to be found anywhere.
The discussion of proof coins on p. 16 contains the following misleading statement: "Coins made for collectors are polished. They are known as proof coins." In the minting of proof coins, the blanks and dies are polished, resulting in a mirror-like background on the coin; the coin itself, however, is not "polished".
The author continues on this same page with a discussion of old coins and their value. Since the topics covered on p. 16 are proof coins and old coins, it is quite odd that the facing page features a full-page photograph of a Susan B. Anthony dollar, which is neither a proof specimen nor old and valuable.
A listing at the back of the book of web sites to visit does not even include the U.S. Mint's own web site. Of course, if the author had done even a minimal amount of research and visited this site, he would have found the information he needed to write knowledgeably about where mint facilities are located and how proof coins are made.
All in all, this is a poorly researched, poorly produced book. I would have given it a no star rating, but that is not an available option.

My son just purchased this album for his Canadian large cent collection. We are extremely unhappy with the quality of this book. The slots are too small and do not accomodate the coins. They do not "snap in" like other coin books we have for his other collections. We expected it to be a better product because Whitman has a reputation for good products, but we are dissatisfied with this one and plan to return the book.