My Roman coin collection spans from Julius Caesar through Theodosius I/Eugenius. I've attempted to make a comprehensive list of every person for which bust coins were issued, and determined which to include in my goal collection based on relevance (Do they have a story worth telling?) and price/budget (the ultimate determining factor). My end goal with the collection is to present it in a way that would be appealing and interesting to other people. I want them to be able to easily learn about the stories and observe the corresponding coins systematically. I know that people will not want to be held captive long enough to walk them through the whole spiel verbally, and honestly, I probably wouldn't want to do that multiple times either. I figured that I needed to provide a system that would allow people to enjoy the collection at their own pace and leisure. The best solution that I could think of was to label the coins with a number/letter system and put together a book that could be printed out and bound with labels in headers that correspond to the labeling system. Here is a picture showing how my coins are stored and labeled, the orange and green stickers are visible on the tops. Yes, they are slabbed, but lets not make that the subject of this thread. The "Book" ended up being a more ambitious endeavor than I was expecting. I've been working on it during my free time for couple of months now and I've only managed to get through Commodus! I was hoping that some of you might find it interesting enough to have a look, provide some feedback, make use of it, and maybe even help with the effort! Here is a link to the pdf on Google Drive. I tried to upload the Word version on Drive and Docs, but the fonts and formatting get all screwed up. If you'd like an editable Word version then please provide an email address in a private message and I'll send it as an attachment. https://drive.google.com/file/d/18ZKmksNPwyVZ1Ksc8WpqP3sqerYN88ta/view?usp=sharing A couple of disclaimers: - In one sense, I'm shooting for historical accuracy, so if I've completely misstated something factual then I'd like to know (wrong date, wrong person, etc.). In another sense, I am going for sensationalism to make the experience interesting for the reader. When it comes to the more outlandish and questionably factual stories, I just state them without pretext. I do not do a lot of "this probably didn't happen, but" or "this was probably made-up to tarnish blah blah". - I made this for my own use. I straight up lifted pictures off the internet and pasted them in there without attribution. I also got all of my information online (Primarily Wikipedia), and while I attempted to summarize and put things in my own words, I wasn't terribly concerned about avoiding plagiarism. Like I said, I'm not holding my breath, but I wanted to put this out there in case any of you found it interesting. If this is something that would be useful to others, and a group of us was willing to chip in some work, then we could divvy up the remaining players and get this thing knocked out! I'll leave it at that for now, thanks for reading.
PS- I did have a look at your book in the PDF- and it looks great- but I did not have the time to give it the attention it deserves.
I've read a few pages so far and it's very well done! I'll read the rest when I get a chance over the weekend. (I found a couple misused words - nothing major. I don't know whether you're looking for input like that or not.)
I picked it up on Amazon, it was in the $50 range if I remember correctly. I'm happy with them. I'm looking for any input that you guys feel would increase the quality and usability of the book. I'm a bit of a stickler for that kind of thing, so if I've made mistakes then I'd very much like to hear about them. Besides, if I've misused words, then that means that I have something to learn!
I work in downtown Atlanta and live in a 400 ft2 condo, so I'm all about keeping things as consolidated as possible for the time being. I plan to move back near my family and get a house once I retire, and figured I'd construct a more elaborate display at that point. You're right though, those trays would be nice. I'll have to consider incorporating something like that. Probably pretty much what you'd expect, I knocked out all the low hanging fruit (cheapest ones) first. The ultimate quality of the collection will be determined by the slots that are still empty!
