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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 2631545, member: 19463&quot;]It can be hard on all of us but there is a fact that old books that have not been updated can be very expensive but old books replaced by something better can lose most of their value overnight.&nbsp; Ken uses the example of Emmett but that book has almost no photos so the pencil rubbings in Dattari-Savio are not made obsolete by the new book.&nbsp; How many books do you need on a subject?&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>When I started in coins, there was dispute among collectors about the relative value of Cohen and the more recent and scholarly RIC/BMC sets.&nbsp; They were not competitive works because they approached the subject in such a different way.&nbsp; Cohen listed coin by ruler in alphabetical order by reverse legend.&nbsp; He completely ignored mint marks and made no separation of coins by style into separate listings unless the two mints in question made a spelling change between the two.&nbsp; Some numbers might represent a dozen very different coins making it hard on a specialist to know what was being sold on an unillustrated, paper list (which were very common in those days).&nbsp; Some sellers saw no reason that any of us might care about such trivia.&nbsp; Cohen was organized to make coins easy to find but not to transmit much information other than the fact they exist.</p><p><br /></p><p>RIC, however had the opposite problem.&nbsp; It is hard to find many later coins in RIC because they are missing the mintmarks needed to know if the coin in hand is on page 124 or 541 (or a dozen places inbetween).&nbsp; RIC was organized to transmit information and organization but not to be easy on beginners.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Sear followed suit with Cohen but listed some mintmark that fit resulting in confusion for beginners who wondered if they had a rarity because their coin read ANT where Sear quoted ALE.&nbsp; How much does each new edition of RIC reduce to value of the old volume?&nbsp; In the case of the new RIC vol. II part 1, we need to remember that those who collect coins from Nerva to Hadrian need to keep the old book, too. </p><p><br /></p><p>A big exception in old books becoming worthless was cause when Sear came out with his &#039;Millennium&#039; edition one volume at a time making the old one volume editions valuable to people who wanted a portable reference rather than a stack of books (many of which had not come out by the time the collectors of later coins might have hoped). </p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ll also point out that some books were simply not worth much on the day they came out.&nbsp; We may well differ on which ones these are.&nbsp; Anyone want to buy my copy of Hill on Septimius Severus?&nbsp; You shouldn&#039;t.&nbsp; I know it is in a box somewhere but which box is quite another matter.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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