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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 3471374, member: 19463&quot;]My copy arrived today.&nbsp; It was new and shrink wrapped.&nbsp; The seller offered a discount on multiple copies but I have no idea how many he has.&nbsp; When the book first came out, I was told that it would not be to my liking and I should not buy it (by a dealer who had seen it).&nbsp; At the issue price, that was absolutely correct.&nbsp; At $69+$17 postage, I believe the book is OK but I still have serious problems with it but have not read a single word of the text so I can not say whether the book will be educational enough to overcome the things I don&#039;t like.&nbsp; The big problem to my was of thinking is that this is just a record of a single collection of a very wealthy collector who had absolutely <u>no</u> use for cheap coins.&nbsp; It is filled with rarities including gold I have never seen.&nbsp; It is very weak in &#039;ordinary&#039; coins even ihigh grades (99% of the coins are very high grade) .&nbsp; The Parthian section has a reasonable coverage of silver but no bronzes (zero!) or rarities that don&#039;t come in EF.&nbsp; The Sasanian section is weakest in the most common rulers with only 13 Khusro (Husrav) II including three gold and one rare silver with full facing bust.&nbsp; It is wonderful to see these but the 9 others will hardly help anyone appreciate the span of this huge coinage let alone catalog their collection.&nbsp; The Elymais section has <u>five</u> AE coins and 18 rare silvers.&nbsp; The Kushan section has two silvers, many gold and not a single bronze.&nbsp; The book should have been titled &quot;The Precious Metal Numismatic Art of Persia&quot;.&nbsp; Do not buy it as a guide to the series listed in the contents.&nbsp; Many of the sections are just a few rarities and not a representative sample.&nbsp; The book is like an auction catalog of a very, very nice personal collection fleshed out by chapter head articles that I look forward to reading and should make the book worth much more than a simple auction catalog.</p><p><br /></p><p>That brings us to another matter.&nbsp; The book was published by CNG and has the usual CNG quality photos in actual size with highlights enlarged.&nbsp; There is a lot of blank space on the pages that could have been used for enlargements of the smaller coins but the better, usually larger, coins were selected for enlargement.&nbsp; The opportunity was missed when CNG did not list in the book how we could find all the digital images of the coins from their wonderful website. Then we could see enlarged versions of the tiny coins than really deserved better images than life size paper photos can provide.&nbsp; I would like to see this made a standard part of all print on paper books.&nbsp; Even the best photography loses something when shown life size on book grade paper. </p><p><br /></p><p>I have a lot of reading to do.&nbsp; Today, I am hopeful that I will find $86 worth of value in the text but by the time I finish reading, I suspect all the discounted copies will be gone.&nbsp; Should you buy one, too?&nbsp; Good question.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I do not dispute this opinion (pending reading the text).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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