As a beginner collector of ancient coins , could those who have read books on this subject , please recommend some books , that you feel would increase my knowledge in this area of coin collecting. I thank all ahead of time that respond to this request for information . Happy collecting !! Dillan
What period are you interested in? Roman republic? Imperial? Provincial? Greek? Magna Grecia? Judean? Persian? Parthian? Cypriot? Byzantine? Sear's Millenium edition is a good resource for Republic and Imperial coins up to the end of the 1st century. He also has volumes all the way to the Constantine dynasty and they are not very expensive.
We get this question quite often and we never really give a satisfactory answer, I believe, because there is not one. I agree there are decent books that cover some aspects of ancient coins but there really is no good book to serve as a first exposure to the subject as a whole. There will be those here who say that only one part of ancient coins is worth collecting so all you need is the one volume that covers that area but even at the 'once over lightly' level most books we recommend are a multi-volume set. I wish I could write a decent introduction to the whole of ancient coin collecting. I could not. Wayne Sayles made a good effort with his first volume of his Ancient Coin Collecting series but the main use of that book has been to guide users to which of the other five volumes in his set you should buy next. I guess there are really very few people who really want to collect 'ancient' coins as a whole compared to those who want some subset and plan to ignore the rest. That brings us back to Jay's question: My online answer is a little longer but not what you wanted and not on paper: http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/voc.html It was written for a friend who taught art history and wanted a short summary. 'Short' here is a relative term. If it were even a little comprehensive, the paper version would be hard to lift.
