I posted on another thread my views on the second worst and worst coin handbooks in my area (Republican coins): Rainer Albert's book is only the second worse handbook on Republican coins ever. At least I can look at the photos and note "fake, tooled, altered, wrong attribution, another fake, more altered coins, same photo as used to illustrate a different type 10 pages back, yet more fakes". The worst book ever is the Spanish FFC (Calico) handbook on Roman Republican coins. Calico and friends made up non existent coin types using PhotoShop. They altered inscriptions, added symbols etc. The photos in FFC are fake photos. That's the worst ever. I have other non-handbook terrible books I could add to the list, but I would first like to invite others to contribute examples of really terrible numismatic works in their own areas. I betcha there's loads of bad examples.
Maybe you could do Amazon buyers a favor by reviewing the book there. I know you did me a favor because it was on my radar to buy at the right price. Now I won't buy it.
I believe I already reviewed Albert's book on Amazon. But the reviews only appear on the sub-sites they were written on. So I can't recall whether I did so on amazon.de or .uk or .com. Many years ago anyway. I also posted comments on German and Austrian forums. I got one response along the lines of "there are no other German language alternatives". True. But for the sorts of books we need, mostly the language doesn't matter much. RSC1, RCTV have been tried and tested for over fifty years. The trick when writing a new book on a well-covered subject is to make it 'not worse' than the old books. If the language was an issue, then a simple translation of RSC or RCTV would at least have made a book that was not full of numismatic mistakes.
98% chance I bought my copy on .de or .uk. I may not have access to .com to write reviews there. But wherever I posted reviews, I recall listing about 80 attribution errors and sharing as widely as possible. There's two editions. The second edition has all the same errors. It would have been the first edition I commented on. It didn't get better.
I find it amazing he didn’t list with each occurance that it was retouched. Even then I don’t approve- any time I couldn’t get a photo for Potamikon I used a basic schematic drawing from a c. 400 year old book, so there’s no confusion. Even in such cases, if the existence of the coin were in question, which was rare, it was clearly labeled as such.
agree. In many cases FFC 'designed' on photoshop a type mentioned in Babelon that never existed, despite later numismatists such as Bahrfeldt or Crawford making clear the type had been misread and never existed. In other cases they took a text description of a genuine coin and went onto Photoshop and guessed where the letters and symbols might be placed.
I have no wisdom to offer on the book issue, but I just made my first visit to Andrew McCabe‘s website. Wow. What a generous resource. If you haven’t been there, do yourself a favor: http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/
thanks! I appreciate it. The site needs a bit of updating as there are some dead pic links due to my upgrading illustrated coins from my collection. But I think there's a lot of useful content. Site has been up since 2004 so this is its fifteenth active year.
I couldn't agree more. Excellent resource which is laid out in a logical and easy to use format. Thanks to @Andrew McCabe for doing all the hard work. I admire those of you who have worked so hard on websites (thinking of @dougsmit and @Valentinian, but there are others) which allow the rest of us to benefit from their knowledge.
Andrew is being modest, however. He has worked right alongside some of the brightest academics in the field!
Happy XVth. Are you accepting or giving votive offerings? Thanks for your note. I have both books. They are on the top shelf of my RR library gathering dust. I started collecting RR coins before I was comfortable finding pictures on line. I bought a few books to help me ID coins. I became more selective after buying Albert & FFC. The list below is from my woefully out of date spreadsheet of RR coins. A book on the list that I liked for its pictures was RR Coins in the National Museum of Warsaw. Cr 256 / 2a BMCRR Rome 1056 Sear: #, VF, EF 877 Bab Caecilia 22 CRR 510 CRI NMWar 362 NMCr I have a different list for cast bronze coins.
For what its worth @Andrew McCabe and other gentlemen, a big auction of Republican coins used to illustrate the FFC (hopefully none of those invented ones ) is upon us. https://www.sixbid.com/browse.html?auction=5369
