Printed Set of Cohen 's Monnaies Sous L'Empire Romain (with photos)

I have wanted a physical copy of Cohen for quite some time. I think it is certainly a testament to the work that Henry Cohen did that his work is not just still used after 140 year, but that it is very often used by people who's primary language is not French.

I already own Sear, RIC and much of BMC, so it is not easy to make the case that I needed Cohen, but there are cases you just want something and for me this was one of those cases.

This wonderful edition was published by the ADEVA Academic Printing & Publishing Company in Graz, Austria in 1955. It contains the original eight volumes of Cohen's original Second Edition which was published in serial form between 1880 and 1892. In addition you will notice a thin 9th volume which (although described as a dictionary) is really more of a transliteration from the original French into German, English, Italian and Spanish. The set is bound in green cloth with red and gold title tags on the spines of the respective volumes.





Sadly Henry Cohen did not live to see the complete publication of his Second expanded edition. He died after the publication of the volume one and his obituary appears at the beginning of the second volume. Posterity is grateful that he had done a lot of work on the rest of the Second Edition and that those who took up the task were dedicated to the work.



I love the wonderful line drawings that these books are full of. The photos used in modern coin books are well and good, but I think most would admit that there is a certain charm to the layout below that can't be matched by photos.



I hope you have enjoyed this glimpse inside my library.

 

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Are the drawings by Dardel?

 

That's cool, thanks for sharing.

 

Very nice addition to your library, Aethelred.

One can get as much pleasure, if not more, from works such as this as from the coin themselves. I also collect reference works, in my case predominantly on Latin American coinage.

 

Lovely bindings and set. Congrats.

 

Nice set. Glad they found a good home on your book shelf.

I was not aware of this, but it is like The Coinage of the Roman Republic by Edward Allen Sydenham which was published in 1952 after his death in 1948.

 

I never did buy the Cohen set. I know, as a dealer I should (perhaps). When I first got started one could buy the set very cheaply. RIC was the new standard and few saw the use in obtaining outdated references in a language few could read. The advantages? Some volumes of Cohen were updated and published after RIC so they will include some very rare and interesting coins. I probably should have bought a set when they were cheap, but I see no need now. I have always been one to dispose of outdated references when an updated and better one was published, especially so when they cross reference to earlier works. Emmett's work on Alexandrian coinage is a good example. Do you need Milne, Dattari, ANS, BMC, etc when they are cross referenced? Only if they contain information which is not in that inclusive work.

But, I am also a Bibliophile. I love books (uh, that's redundant), and for those which I see a use I buy them and use them.

 

@Ken Dorney An email or PM from you offering old, used, unwanted or unloved numismatic reference books would always be a welcome thing!

 

I got rid of most unwanted books last year! Sorry! And, they went uber cheap. Few want to buy books anymore, even rare ones. I'll look through and see if there is anything to PM you about.

 

Im always a year or so late to the party!

 

It can be hard on all of us but there is a fact that old books that have not been updated can be very expensive but old books replaced by something better can lose most of their value overnight. Ken uses the example of Emmett but that book has almost no photos so the pencil rubbings in Dattari-Savio are not made obsolete by the new book. How many books do you need on a subject?

When I started in coins, there was dispute among collectors about the relative value of Cohen and the more recent and scholarly RIC/BMC sets. They were not competitive works because they approached the subject in such a different way. Cohen listed coin by ruler in alphabetical order by reverse legend. He completely ignored mint marks and made no separation of coins by style into separate listings unless the two mints in question made a spelling change between the two. Some numbers might represent a dozen very different coins making it hard on a specialist to know what was being sold on an unillustrated, paper list (which were very common in those days). Some sellers saw no reason that any of us might care about such trivia. Cohen was organized to make coins easy to find but not to transmit much information other than the fact they exist.

RIC, however had the opposite problem. It is hard to find many later coins in RIC because they are missing the mintmarks needed to know if the coin in hand is on page 124 or 541 (or a dozen places inbetween). RIC was organized to transmit information and organization but not to be easy on beginners.

Sear followed suit with Cohen but listed some mintmark that fit resulting in confusion for beginners who wondered if they had a rarity because their coin read ANT where Sear quoted ALE. How much does each new edition of RIC reduce to value of the old volume? In the case of the new RIC vol. II part 1, we need to remember that those who collect coins from Nerva to Hadrian need to keep the old book, too.

A big exception in old books becoming worthless was cause when Sear came out with his 'Millennium' edition one volume at a time making the old one volume editions valuable to people who wanted a portable reference rather than a stack of books (many of which had not come out by the time the collectors of later coins might have hoped).

I'll also point out that some books were simply not worth much on the day they came out. We may well differ on which ones these are. Anyone want to buy my copy of Hill on Septimius Severus? You shouldn't. I know it is in a box somewhere but which box is quite another matter.

 

I consider the current appreciation for good numismatic literature to be a cause for lamentation. It is not only in Classical numismatics that book go unappreciated. In the shop where I work and where US coins make up 95% of our business, one of the hardest things to do is to sell a new and excited collector a coin book. I will grant that the typical US collector is not as interested in the study and historical background of the items that they collect as the typical ancient or medieval collector is, but given the less than twenty dollar barrier to entry posed by a "Redbook" you might be forgiven for thinking they would like to know something.

I see ancient collecting as "the deep end of the pool" in coin collecting. Ancient collectors generally want to know more, but also need to know more. While one does not need a well curated library to collect and enjoy ancient coins, I find that owning carefully selected books adds much to the pleasure I derive from this hobby.

You can certainly match your coins up to examples listed on various online resources if all you need is a reference number, but there is so much more begging to be know and appreciated.