While doing some research on the net last night, I found this site called "Openlibrary"- http://openlibrary.org/search?q=coins Some of the books from the 19th and early 20th century are here in their entirety- copied and available for download or printing. There are a few about the collections of Greek, Roman, Asian and Indian coins. Find a "readable" icon and click on it. Then you can open the book and read it page by page and print off individual pages. Here's a couple of examples: http://www.archive.org/stream/cataloganglos01brituoft#page/n7/mode/2up This one has some incredible Conder tokens: http://www.archive.org/stream/provincialcopper00pyeciala#page/n5/mode/2up http://www.archive.org/stream/provincialcopper00pyeciala#page/n5/mode/2up
Thanks, diggit! Great find. Lovely old books. Among other famous books in that archive are Montroville Dickeson’s American Numismatical Manual (first published in 1859), and two works by coin dealer Eduard Frossard, Monograph of United States Cents and Half Cents Issued Between the Years 1793 and 1857 and Varieties of United States Cents of the Year 1794. See also: http://www.gutenberg.org (United States Notes by John Jay Knox (1884) and Ashbel Woodward’s 1868 lecture, “Wampum: A Paper Presented to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia.”) books.google.com (Paper Money of the United States: (18th edition, 2006) by Arthur and Ira Friedberg and Ancient Coin Collecting (six volumes) by Wayne Sayles (2003).) onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ (The Medallic History of Oliver Cromwell by Henry William Henfrey (1877), Byzantine Coinage, by Philip Grierson (1999), and Bearers of Meaning: The Ottilia Buerger Collection of Ancient and Byzantine Coins at Lawrence University, ed. by Carol L. Lawton (1995).) http://www.coinbooks.com/ (The Numismatic Bibliomania Society provides a full text of Martin Gengerke’s American Numismatic Auctions, an 1100-page compilation organized by auction firm, chronology, and named consignors.) .
Thanks Mike for the additional sites. I'm already a member of ANA and I have the issues piled up for the long winter nights' reading. It's great to see some of the rarer reference books being scanned and made available for the public. In a few day's, I'll be posting a couple of items (rare, I believe) that actually caused me to stumble across the "Openlibrary" site. This site contains a few books that are scanned in their entirety which contains the information I was looking for that wasn't available anywhere else. If I was to purchase these book, they would have cost me in excess of $600 each.
Those are all fantastic sites for many things. I use them extensively for searches, not just numismatics. Also consider some colleges and universities have online databases of their holdings, as do major library institutions, such as: Yale's Orbis library catalog Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library [Housed in a stunning piece of architecture!] The New York Public Library: Online Catalog The American Numismatic Society (NYC) Library catalog: Database of Numismatic Materials Princeton University - Department of Numismatics (RBSC) -- Searchable Database Note that these links tend to be better for Ancients than modern coins as they are more academic and historically leaning. There are certainly more databases from other institutions in the US and around the world so don't stop with just these...
I'm missing the point here. What good is a listing of what is available to those associated with a university to those of us whose IP prevents us from seeing the material? Yale, for one, clearly states their site is only for Yale accounts. I tried each of the above links and was not able to find anything they would actually let me see. Whether there is a trick to using the sites or they have nothing, nothing presented itself actually to be seen. Hints?
Go to the Orbis link, type in a search phrase like 'numismatics' in the search box, get results. You can visit the library in person or seek out the book in your local library, use Interlibrary loan, see if the ANA Dwight N. Manley library may have the text for loan, search other libraries for the same titles. It's a useful resource for finding things not necessarily easy to find in a book shop or local public library. These are resources for tracking down things, not necessarily links that will yield results for actually reading the texts online. In some cases, like with the ANS and ANA, you may be able to search the database, but need to be a member to loan materials. These are all very broad and dense resources which you could utilize for obscure and esoteric searches.
