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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 2070383, member: 19463&quot;]I wish we had an accurate guide to rarity like one you have mentioned but it just does not exist.&nbsp; acsearch and the sellers that contribute to it (certainly including CNG) are heavily weighted to &#039;better&#039; coins.&nbsp; Before the Internet, we had the same situation with glossy catalogs (here I&#039;m talking before CNG).&nbsp; Judging from the offerings of &#039;name&#039; sellers, coins of Septimius Severus were about the same rarity as those of Pescennius Niger and Pertinax and even more common than falling horsemen.&nbsp; That was because no one ever bothered to put out a catalog full of $2 coins and that was the going rate&nbsp; back then.&nbsp; You still will have a harder time finding a photo online for a $coin that fairly sells for $10 than you will a $1000 coin because the houses are in business to make money (as it should be) and it costs the same to pay an expert cataloger to write up a horseman as it does to do a tetradrachm.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>For me, collector of Eastern Severans and Falling Horsemen (among a hundred other things), it could be worse.&nbsp; Imagine how hard it must be to find information in the usual places if your interest were tokens or medieval Indians.&nbsp; The smart answer might be to buy a book (one that already exists like Boehringer or Crawford) first and only collect things in that book.&nbsp; I doubt there ever will be a decent reference on half the things some of us collect.&nbsp; I am amazed that van&#039;t Haaff got published&nbsp; considering the attitude mot collectors have toward Elymais. Waiting for examples in the major sales on things that may exist in only a couple specimens might get tedious.&nbsp; Maybe the best course of action is to stop showing things we like and just tell beginners only to collect slabbed mint state denarii of Severus Alexander.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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