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Message:: [QUOTE="red_spork, post: 2710640, member: 74282"]Babelon(and most every other reference published earlier) is certainly of far less value than Crawford, though the line drawings are, in my opinion, an easier way to try and read some of the coins and their symbols than the plates in Crawford, especially for the bronzes. The plates in the later reprint of Crawford are not great at all, so as a companion, a book like Babelon can be nice, but the information is so out of date that it is of limited value and while many sources have augmented Crawford since it was published in 1974, it is still the best single reference there is. In addition, as you mentioned there are numerous easily searched online sources with high resolution images of coins just a click away. Many of Crawford's plate coins come from the BnF or BMC anyways, so in many cases a better photograph can be found online of the exact coin from the Crawford plates. The biggest argument I can see for the usefulness of a book like Babelon is the familial organization system that it pioneered which has been continued by RSC. This is largely a preference thing, but I honestly prefer a chronological system like the one used by Crawford simply because I prefer to view the coins in the context of related issues chronologically rather than related issues from the same family that might be separated by several decades[/QUOTE]