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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 4422477, member: 19463&quot;]This is the best way to spend $2.84!</p><p><br /></p><p>No one knows how many variations there are of most coins.&nbsp;&nbsp; Books can tell you what is known to them but no author checks every collection and is bound to miss something.&nbsp; Add to that the possibility that someone out there is digging and might find something new.&nbsp; This is why I dislike catalog numbers.&nbsp; People tend to force numbers on their coins.&nbsp; With so many minor variations, we tend to say something is a match even though there is some little difference like what the eagle is standing on or how many lies secure the king&#039;s clothing or where legends split or any number of things.&nbsp; Many coins are&nbsp; listed as xyz VAR. indicating that the match was less than perfect but the closest available with the amount of looking that was done.&nbsp; The worst offender here may be RIC volume V which has a couple dozen variations covered by a single number.&nbsp; The best case is when there is a die study like Boehringer did for Syracuse tetradrachms.&nbsp; That does not mean there is not a possible new find (a die that shattered after a very few strikes???) but few coins have had this treatment.&nbsp; We learn a lot from studies that are even 50% complete but we should not fool ourselves into believing we know all there is to know because we read a book.&nbsp; My specialty of the Eastern denarii of Septimius Severus occupies 30 pages in RIC.&nbsp; In the meantime, the British museum and a hundred private collectors have been adding to the list.&nbsp; If they redid that volume asking even the ones they knew might have something (including half a dozen that post here), the new lists would take twice the space and be out of date as early as &#039;when the ink dries&#039;.&nbsp;&nbsp; Not having any idea is part of the appeal of collecting these things.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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