Hi All, We get a lot of newbie coin collectors coming to Coin Talk, and I mean hundreds per week. We more experienced collectors often suggest to the newbies to get the Red Book. The Red Book is the most common reference book, a new edition is published yearly, and every experienced collector has multiple editions on his/her shelf. To help out the newbies, could some of our more experienced people explain why a newbie would find having a Red Book as a handy reference valuable?
I'll be the first to contribute. Remember, the Red Book is only useful for people who are collecting US coins. Other countries have something similar to the Red Book, some don't.
The Red Book is a listing of all US coins - from beginning to end complete with mintage numbers and brief histories of each coin. But the beginning of the Red Book is perhaps the most often overlooked section to be used as a resource. In the first few pages and then the Forward there is a great deal of information of interest to collectors. Few ever take the time to read it though and miss out on what it contains.
The current Red Book is not only a good item to have but also a good history of coin prices over the years. I've been keeping mine for about 30 years, and they help when I have to follow coin trends. For the foreign coin collector, the Krause catalogs are a good reference item.
