Crawford RRC 2019 Reprint (?)

Blame Disney. A long time ago copyrights expired at 25 years (with the option to renew once), or 50 years after the death of the author in the case of books. That allowed the innovator (and his estate after death) to profit from the work, while allowing material to regularly enter the public domain every generation so as to prevent stifling innovation. However, when Mickey Mouse's copyright was about to expire, Disney lobbied twice and got the laws changed. This year was the first year in over 40 years that stuff got into the public domain thanks to Disney's meddling, so stuff from 1923 just went into the public domain finally. Hopefully Disney won't interfere again soon to keep Mickey out of the public domain, or next time the law might be that it will take 150 years for something to go into the public domain. At that rate there won't be any innovation left as everyone will be terrified of doing anything because they might get sued by someone holding a copyrights for some process someone else did 125+ years before.

 

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There is a Copyright Clearance Center. Go to https://www.copyright.com/ and enter the ISBN 978-0-521-07492-6. Click "Pay Per Use options". You will learn that you can pay $45 for permission to photocopy the book or 20 cents a page for a copy on CD-ROM.

The publisher has done the right thing. They set a low price and made it easy to pay. Everyone who has a copy should go to the web site and pay.

 

I don't know about that....at th we prices I'm better off paying the overinflated prices for an old copy whenever I can find it. About $140 per book for photocopies doesn't seem like much of a bargain.

 

Ah I stand totally corrected and apologise for assuming these were bootlegs. $45 for an approved pdf and/or permission to copy sounds reasonable but £63 for the physical book is a screaming bargain.

I've always been close to the print and publishing part of the coin business. I recall 15 years ago routinely sending emails to friends at Spink regarding digital (then DVD) scans of their books which eBay sellers would list always on a Friday night for 48 hours so it was sold before their office reopened on Monday and they could complain. Then they adapted and started dealing with the bootlegs on Saturday and Sunday mornings. It was cannibalising their sales of standard works such as RIC new editions. Glad to see there's now means to do this legit. Once again I apologize for my mis statements.

This weekend I spent in the library of Simon Bendell. It's a joy to visit the library of any great numismatist. numismatic libraries are all echoes of each other. They rhyme. There's inevitable commality but also always key and surprising differences.

 

In addition to the benefits mentioned by Red Spork for buying the RBW book rather than the catalogue, there's multiple other benefits I would like to add:

- there are about 50 cataloguing corrections in the book. Usually minor items, but the more than one year the RBW book took to prepare allowed me and others to pick up on dozens of minor errors that cannot in practice be picked up in the one month it takes to prepare a sale catalogue. Stuff such as correct references to the correct sub type in Sydenham or elsewhere, where the cut and pasting done in usual sale catalogue prep didn't allow time to check.

- the footnotes for the coins are really quite different from those in the NAC sale catalogues with a great deal of corrected, amended and added information, including a host of extra material written by me as well as by RBW (which he published as Rick Witschonke in Essays Russo).

- There are a small number (perhaps a dozen) of more significant attribution or arrangement changes. These are items where the authors, Russo and de Falco, recognised over the longer term were mis-catalogued, and in the editing process I could alter the arrangement to fix them.

- there are also a number of additions of non-gold coins, where RBW located a type that was missing from NAC 61 or NAC 63 after the sales, but that did belong to him.

All in all, given the extent of changes, I would not consult NAC 61 or 63 if I have a better alternative - the RBW book - at hand.

Serious collectors need both of course, as the RBW book probably has several hundred updates against RRC - new coin types, cataloguing amendments or rearrangements, and the commentary notes.

 

I assume former regarding coin reproductions - smaller, akin to the Durst reprint of Sydenham, or the reprint of Grant's From Imperium to Auctoritas. IF smaller, the plates won't be very pleasant judging by the Sydenham and Grant books.

I am intrigued by the extra pages. It certainly is not an addendum - I know Michael Crawford and he has not been working on anything like that, or else has been keeping it a very tight secret (I know what he is working on). I would say 99.98% chance no new material. I wonder if the text pages are not photographically reproduced but done as text, and thus with smaller pages allowed to flow over many more pages. That would be wonderful as it would maintain legibility within smaller page sizes. I await my copy which should arrive Thursday, and then I will show and tell.

 

I am pleased that a reprint of Crawford is now available. I know of a number of collectors who would like to have a copy. I will state however that I have always suggested that people also purchase the RBW book as well. I have both and use both as needed. I think they compliment each other very well.

 

Thanks. I am hesitant to spend more on another book on Republicans. I'm still smarting from buying Banti which has poor plates by my standards for a book (set) that price. It is a bit sad when the best references on a subject are sales catalogs but, now that there is so much online, 'libraries' are not just books anymore.

 

Just a quick random photo of the plates. It`s medium quality.

 

Banti is a resource aimed at those interested in minor varieties such as symbols, and at provenance hunters like myself. The photos within are dependant of the quality of the original catalogues which are often poor. But they are not much worse than the original sources. For me, Banti is my #3 consulted book after Crawford and RBW. It is where I find at least half my provenances. There's no alternative. Those who need Banti have to have it.

Have you received the book? Perhaps you have an answer to Doug's question about the extra pages - whether the pages are photographic copies or if the text has been run over extra pages to allow for the smaller page sizes. I'm not surprised about photo quality for a £63 book. Collectors seek out and pay a premium for the terrific plates in the original 1974, and still will.

 

Plaster casts?

 

How does everyone feel about re-selling a book?
I know it's legal and fine as someone has paid originally (meaning once!).. however a lot of the discussion here is around ensuring that the publisher and (more importantly) the author/researcher get enough compensation to continue their work - or make it worthwhile...
However a single book (for example) may be sold once for $50 and be sold many times over for $300 dollars each time as supply/demand dictates.
Also if anyone is interested in a Roman Coins and Their Values (whatever volume) by Sear .....you can grab them used for $40 or so on VCoins, yet the new copies are still being sold on his site for $90?
Is this a question of pure legality or compensating the publisher/author?

Not trying to make a hard point - just genuinely interested in the answer..

 

A book becomes personal property once sold, and as your personal property it can be legally re-sold over and over again. What you can't do is reproduce the text (ie. copy) without the author's permission, as you only bought the right to use the copy you paid for. Copyright law covers everything else other than your right to the copy you paid for, which you can dispose of as you see fit.

It's like when you buy a car. Once you purchase the vehicle, the auto company can't come to you and say 'Excuse me, but this is our car and you can't do anything to it unless we say so, so we order you to only use X brand for your tires and Y brand for your windshield washer fluid. ' Not only is that not legal, but it is also anathema to our consumer society. Pretty much the only company that gets away with that is Apple, and only because their consumers are brainless zombies who are happy to have the company tell them they can't repair the product they paid for, or modify said product.

 

So purely a legal thing here (as I understood it originally. I have a very basic understanding of copyright law). I was getting the impression from some of the posts that there was a "moral" reason for not sharing content.

Hopefully non-lawyers may provide their input...... that is more of what I am interested in.

 

I'm sure there is a moral component too somewhere, but there's the law, and then there's morality. The two are not necessarily compatible a lot of the time. Something I've come to realize quite well after 7 years as an attorney.

And don't forget Fair Use Act. You can use quotes or excerpts from a work without asking permission, for academic/educational purposes, or to criticize, review, report on it, make fun of it, or teach about it. Which is why @shanxi did not break the law by showing that photo of the page. He/she was doing it to inform others about it/comment on it...and it was a limited excerpt.

 

Thank you @Sallent for the legal viewpoint. I appreciate it.. to the point and valid. Hopefully non-lawyers may provide their input...... that is more of what I am interested in. I sensed a moral lean to many of the posts and the strict legal view seems contrary (in some ways) to the desired outcome.

 

I was asked about the additional pages. I don't have the original book to compare, but I don't see anything which appears to be added, there is no "corrections" chapter or something like this. The text looks not like a photo copy, it might be just another text arrangement.

 

In cars, they call that a lease. You have to return it in their definition of good shape. Software for computers is now moving toward the same concept with Office 365. I regret the modern move to online books because of what it does to used book stores. I once lived to go to used book stores. Libraries today are cutting back on non-fiction reference books because you can get the information online. What is left is recreational fiction (I read little fiction and hate the concept of historical fiction). If I want fantasy, I'll watch TV where being mindless is expected. Books donated to a library here are scanned to see if that bar code is on the used book want list (things Amazon sells for high prices) so what is left is that material not worth the postage. Local brick and morter used book dealers stopped coming to the library sales because they could not find good material.

Perhaps we are moving toward time limited entertainment rather like HBO available as long as you pay the monthly subscription. This could include pay for play book libraries like the ANA ('free to members' is not free but rented).

The question is what you buy when you buy something. Increasingly purchases are not fully 'yours'. Do you get the rights to the item of just a hard or soft copy to hold while the ownership remains with the seller. Here is a business model for you to consider. We will call it a coin club. Every month you pay a fee and they send you coins (in bar coded slabs of course) which you have to return when you stop paying the fee or wish to trade them in for different coins. You can select from several levels ranging from Late Roman Bronzes at $50 a month to Museum Specimens level at $5000 a month allowing you temporary custody of Eid Mar denarii, Colosseum sestertii and assorted aurei. It is the hands on version of the Athena Funds where they sold shares of coins you could never see. Obviously the real winners here would be the post office and insurance companies but it would save us wondering who we should tell the kids to contact when we die.

 

Yes, I did think about that last night. It's true that some software has moved to subscription based models where you don't own the copy but rather lease it. You can't do that for all software....for example, I doubt anyone will ever agree to buy a laptop that you have to pay a monthly subscription just to turn on....at least not unless the laptop is "free" up front and the fees low enough to make that option more attractive.

It is ultimately up to the consumer to decide if true ownership is worth it or not. If Microsoft Word as a subscription service wasn't worth it, people would have rejected it. But to most it was worth paying $100 a year for it vs. having to pay $250 for a new copy every two years or two and a half years when you upgrade computers.

 

So I got my RRC reprint
- it has the same number of pages as the original
- it is the exact same dimensions as the original.

The mystery is solved. The statistics about the reprint are totally wrong. Same size, same pages, same layout. Undoubtedly photographically reproduced. While the plates may be lower resolution, they are bright and clean and reproduced on good quality paper. From an ordinary utility perspective it's just as useful as the $1000 1974 edition and probably more convenient than any of the reprints from 1980 through 2015 as the brightly printed plates probably read easier than those in the muddy reprints. Purists may like the thicker paper and higher photo resolution of the 1974 original print, but this is 98% as good. Very pleased with it.

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