Best sites to buy reference books, especially out of print books

So far this year I have bought one ancient coin and 15 ancient coin books, yet somehow I'm still not satisfied.

What sites should I be shopping on for more books? I am especially after earlier books that might now be out of print.

Just as one example I like to find the late 60s edition of Vol. V and VI of BMC to complete my set.

 

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My son and I have a few of these, that are far as I can tell are way out of print and copyright. You could literally read and look at old photos and illustrations for years.

Ebay, put "Ancient coin books DVD" into the search box. You do need a DVD-Rom drive, which most computers have now.

One example :
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ancient-Coi...955751?hash=item43f96503e7:g:-YAAAOSws65Tp1hX

 

Every computer I have had since 2008 hasn't had a dvd player.

 

I have an external drive I use when needed.

 

There is a Huge difference between reading a book on a screen and enjoying a book in hand.

@Aethelred - you know well I'm a bookish guy and my favorite go to site for searching tomes is viaLibri

viaLibri searches multiple databases including abebooks, alibris, biblio, and amazon among multiple others. The best thing about this is that you can exclude the PODs (Print on Demand) copies that have flooded sites like eBay making searches nearly worthless. Also, there are multiple search options available allowing you to fine tune a search. I always enter in the least amount of information to yield the greatest amount of hits and then fine tune from there.

I don't know much about BMC so I'm guessing here:

BMC Vol. V

BMC Vol. VI

 

Great resource, thank you Doug!

 

Kolbe & Fanning: https://www.numislit.com

Charles Davis: https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/charles_davis-44/ancient-coins/Default.aspx?#!/Home

ANE: https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/ancient_numismatic_enterprise-9/ancient-coins/Default.aspx?

 

No problem at all -- I forgot to mention that some sites like viaLibri and ABEbooks allow you to save a wants list. viaLibri charges a subscription for their service-ABE is free. I've maintained a 100+ want list on ABE for more than 10 years and these are all very scarce to absolutely rare books and the best part is they will eMail when one pops up. I've been astoundingly lucky in securing extremely rare books for very little since when a seller posts a book and there is not another to compare pricing they often underprice it. -d

 

Be careful when buying BMC that you get the one you want. The links here give the Greek Coins books while the request here was for BMCRE which covers the Severans.

 

I recommend my own site for ancient-coin books:
http://augustusmath.hypermart.net/numislit.html

 

Thanks Doug !!

Many of these acronyms will take me awhile to learn.

 

Galata

https://www.galata.co.uk/

 

I've had a lot of good luck with AbeBooks recently. Recently picked up a copy of Leu 17, the Nicolas collection, an important RR sale that is tricky to find a copy of. I try to search Abebooks for every book on my want list once a day because some of the more important books tend to go pretty quickly once they get uploaded.

Also, let your favorite dealers know what you want. I got hooked up with a cheap (falling apart, but super cheap) copy of Crawford because a dealer knew I wanted it and called me directly when he came across it

 

Great links and replies!

 

I have not had the courage to bite off BMC Greek yet, I look every now and then, but that is a HUGE and expensive set!

 

Agreed. Many will disagree and that is fine with them. When my wife catches me smelling the paper in one of my books she gives me a disgusted look. I smile knowing that she "just doesnt get it!"

 

I'll usually spring for the old, heavy, bulky printed copy even when a resource is free to use online. To me the feel of the paper and binding, the smell of the book and being able to sit in a leather armchair and leaf through it are worth any small extra cost.

 

Most of BMC Greek can be purchased for $12 as print-on-demand paperback from On Demand Books. Search for the volume you want at Google Books, then click "Get This Book in Print". I have a list of direct links at http://snible.org/coins/bmc/ but it is out-of-date and missing a few volumes.

 

How is the quality of the print on demand in books with photo plates?

 

For the books printed by the Espresso Book Machine, there might be a problem with the scans. Google uses an algorithm to decide if something is text, a line drawing, or a photo. Google does (did?) poorly on some BMC Greek volumes, deciding that 25% of the coins are drawings and rendering them as black blobs. For the images the quality is OK, but this is because the original plates were of VERY high quality, depicting coins of high quality.