The best advice this or any other coin collector ever got is, â€œBuy the book before you buy the coin.â€

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 goodto go. With 463 compact pages of comprehensive, reliable information â€" 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 â€œissuing authoritiesâ€ (empires, cities, tribes, and rulers) and the books that document all this informationrepresent centuries of accumulated scholarship â€" 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 â€œGreek.â€ For convenience, coins issued by many peoples who spoke Semitic, Celtic, Central Asian andother languages are lumped into the â€œGreekâ€ 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 inthe tellingâ€¦

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 secondedition delivers 312 pages of solid advice, with over 300 photographs and many charts and tables. As one reviewer noted, â€œI wish I had this book twenty years ago when I begancollecting.â€ Other titles by the same author cover Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and other coins, plus Classical Deception, the best non-technical book on counterfeit ancients. Ifthese 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 ReferenceLibrary for Classical Numismatics (https://coinweek.com/recent-articles-video/ancient-coin-books-a-collectors-reference-library-for-classical-numismatics/)