Doug Owens writes:

Mr. Owen is certainly a very well-read newcomer, and there's not a book among his list that I wouldn't heartily recommend to others. While I buy and hold innumerable books and periodicals for reference, the ones I cherish most are those which provide a good read.

Three titles I always recommend are Carothers, "Fractional Money", Willem's "The United States Trade Dollar", and "The Fantastic 1804 Dollar" by Newman and Bressett. These are all on U.S. coinage, but that's my collecting bias. The Carothers book should be required reading for any student of American numismatics - it lays out the history, economics and politics of small change in a very readable and informative fashion. The Willem book does the same for a single series - the Trade Dollar, and the Newman-Bressett book does it for a single coin. The research, scholarship, and numismatic detective work in these books set a standard for those which followed.

The Carothers and Willem books have been reprinted. The Newman-Bressett book is long out of print, but it is relatively common, and easier to obtain than the more comprehensive (and also out-of-print) Encyclopedia of U.S. Silver Dollars by Q. David Bowers.

To prove how nuts I am about these books, I've accumulated multiple copies of the original editions, all either signed by the authors or inscribed by famous numismatists to other collectors. I'm not the first to recommend them, and won't be the last. So - what titles do our E-Sylum readers recommend?