I am in the process of building my ancient library and have some questions about the books by Banti. Of particular interest are the Grandi Bronzi Imperiali series. It's my understanding that these are in English and Italian, is that correct of for all editions? Then I am looking at the other two major series he did: Corpus Nummorum Romanorum: Monetazione Repubblicana (red spine) Banti A., Simonetti L., Corpvs Nvmmorvm Romanorvm (green spine) As far as I can tell, the first is on roman republic and the second is imperail, is that correct? Just looking at the spines they appear to both be titled just Corpus Nummorum Romanorum, so I wanted to make sure they are two different series. Second, are both sets bilingual in English and Italian, and if so are all editions that way. I have seen indications that the roman republic series is bilingual, but never seen mention that the imperial series is. Thanks for any help on these. Feel free to PM with any leads on where to get the Grandi Bronzi Imperiali set.
If you look hard enough on the internet, you can find individual copies for $20 +/- a bit. The series is usually hundreds of $. I suggest you decide what book (time period, emperor or moneyer) is most interesting to you, and buy one book. If you like it then consider buying the series as a group. I bought one book in the series, on Augustus. It is bi-lingual in Italian and English. I have considered the RR set, but have found the price higher than I wanted to pay.
I have the Republican set and several volumes of the Imperial set. Both are bilingual. The Republican set only covers "moneyer" coins - no anonymous issues are covered. The best use for these red and green sets are provenance research, and confirming dies (although the photo quality is often too poor for the latter).
Thanks for the responses. I am more interested in the Grandi Bronzi Imperiali, so I will start with those. I will probably also take your advice and buy one of each of the other two series to make sure I find them useful.
I have the red Republican series (nine volumes) and use it to see what excellent examples look like (for that, it is better than web searches, so far. I'm sure the web will catch up). It is organized by family, not chronologically. I think any advanced collector would like to have it, but it is not an up-to-date reference for the dates or backgrounds of the types. It is a large number of images reproduced from old paper catalogs. The green Imperial series is also primarily a large number of images reproduced from old paper catalogs. It is hard to use. It have very numerous pictures of each type, often finely classified by minor differences. You can learn a lot about frequency of types, and provenances are given. However, it was a grand project that didn't receive much favor and stopped dead in the middle of Nero after 18 volumes. It is not easy (possible) to pick volumes that cover what you want, and not easy to use the awkward indexes to find what you want. Coins of a given emperor are spread across several volumes. Back when I was interested in imitations Banti and Simonetti was remarkable for the 70 (!) pages of Claudian imitations it illustrated. No other source came close. If you can afford expensive coins from this time period and like books and have shelf space, you might have fun with the 18 volumes which won't cost more than one excellent coin. If you buy individual volumes you will almost certainly be frustrated by not having the neighboring volumes where the work continues. There seems to have been an attempt to make all volumes the same thickness, but no attempt to "finish off" a topic by the end of the volume.
I only use the Republican and the first 2 volumes of the Imperial series that covers Imperatorial coins, but I use it often. It's great for identifying varieties, such as different control marks, because coins with multiple control marks are organized by mark with examples and references to where the examples are obtained. It's also good for provenance searching. While much of it is bilingual, much of it is still in Italian only. For instance, the names of the control marks are typically only in Italian which will require a quick Google translate...at least it does for me.
The control marks are translated in the front of the first volume. If I had life to live over, I would not buy the books due to the lousy images. I don't hate it enough to sell it for a loss but I find it more a novelty than a useful reference.
Well you might have a buyer above with Beef. I never noticed that the translations were in the first volume; I'll have to check it out. Thanks.
I consider the RR set to be almost indispensable for a serious collector. With the advent of the internet, I no longer consult it every day as I used to, but I still use it several times in a typical week. I use Banti primarily as a photo file, but it contains a surprising amount of original research, as anyone who read my Erato/Terpsichore article will recall. I use the green Imperatorial volumes as well, but I find them less valuable. The range of illustrated coins is less extensive and for me, anyway, the arrangement of types is nonintuitive and tedious.
What edition do you have? I have seen reference that done of the latter editions had worse photo quality.
Are you sure they were talking about Banti? I'm only aware of one edition. I wonder if they were referring to Crawford?
My set has copyright dates from 1980 to 1982 which I assumed to mean they were released sequentially as finished. My set has book plates from Bruce Brace and vary a bit on the amount of spine wear (the black was not well done but some volumes got more use than others). There are a lot of images with variation of quality of coins and images. I wonder if it would be possible to duplicate the coverage using online images. It would not be easy.
