David Fanning makes a living in the niche market of a niche market.

He's one-half of Kolbe & Fanning, a Gahanna firm that calls itself the world's largest dealer of rare and out-of-print numismatic literature. In other words, it sells old books about old coins.

"There really are only five or six individuals in the entire world who can say this is their specialty, this is their full-time business," said Fanning, 44.

His catalog for a recent auction advertised offerings such as The Numismatic Journal for 1836-1837 and Rare Numismatic Oeuvres of Bartolomeo Borghesi.

"Often to people outside our field, it will seem these books are on the most absurdly narrowly focused, tiny, tiny sliver of history - and someone has written a 500-page book on the subject," Fanning said.

We spoke just after he'd returned from a big auction in New York, where a copy of a 16th-century coin book, one of the first ever published, had fetched more than $10,000.

Fanning - like a lot of his customers - fell in love with coin literature after first falling in love with coins as a child.

"I found this coin in my dad's change drawer. It was a 3-cent nickel coin from 1865. . . . Well, I didn't know what it was at all. So I bought a book to tell me. And it kind of took off from there."

Fanning started dealing in coin books at age 15 or 16, mostly as a way to make money so he could buy more coins. He drifted away from the hobby in college (he has a doctorate in English literature from Ohio State University) but returned to it after that.

He'd been a customer of George Kolbe, a longtime dealer in numismatic literature who lives in California. After Fanning tried holding a few book sales on his own, Kolbe invited him to become a partner in the business. Kolbe is now semiretired.

The ability to research coin histories online has affected the business to some extent, but many collectors buy books for more than information, Fanning said.

To demonstrate, he picked up a 19th-century German coin book to show off its leather binding, high-quality illustrations and green page edges (19th-century German bookmakers had a thing for green, he explained.)

"This isn't the standard reference work anymore, but it's very nicely laid out, very nicely printed. It really is quite charming."

To read the complete article, see:
Joe Blundo commentary: Vendor finds money in books about coins (www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2016/01/17/1-vendor-finds-money-in-books-about-coins.html)