I've heard of KM and Y#. KM is from Krause & "don't remember who" manuals and looks very used for money from the whole world. Y#, I don't actually know about it... And there are probably others... I'd like to hear what you know about the referencing systems you know. Many thanks in advance!!! Max
There are many many reference books on coins. I have a bookcase of them that I have collected over the past 30 years. Most depend on your area of collecting. I learned a long time ago, I couldn't collect everything. I tried!! but over the years, I downsized the field to U.S., and then to error coins, and lately to Indian cents,lincolns,3 cent nickles, and buffalo nickles errors, especially double dies. My favorite reference book is Breen's Complete Encyclopedia of US& colonial coins. Followed by Cherrypickers and Snow's for errors. Brenn numbers are used as references and also Snows (indian cents) I have seen rather large number of coin books go by cheap on Ebay, the internet has certainly reduced the need for a large number of reference books on hand. Breen's book is expensive ($120- 150) , and the man had a strange life, but did he know a large spectrum about coins!! Maybe your library has one. A second source of information are Bowers & Merena auction catalogs from the past that are very often unbid on Ebay. The descriptions by Bowers and the trendous photographs are unsurpassed IMO. I have always loved books and knowledge as much as the coins.
Besides KM#s (Krause & Mishler, original editors of the Standard Catalog of World Coins), the two most common IDs for world coins are Yeoman (Y#) and Craig (C#). In fact, Krause uses the well established Y/C numbers for some countries. RS Yeoman was the original editor of the Red and Blue Books. Also among his eight major publications are Modern World Coins 1850-1964 (13th Ed. 1984), a pioneering attempt to catalog world coinage; and the companion Current Coins of the World (8th Ed. 1988), which extended coverage to post-'64 coinage. WD Craig's Coins of the World 1750-1850 (2d Ed.1971) extended Yeoman's coverage by another century earlier. All three works were published by affiliates of Whitman Publishing. Several months ago in response to my inquiry, Whitman said they are considering updated editions of the Yeoman books, but they didn't indicate when to expect them.
The Fuld's developed a dual numbering style system for Civil War tokens, one for Patriotic tokens, and another for the store cards. The patriotics is essentially the two die numbers from the die pair used to make the token, followed by a lower case letter to designate the metal. If needed, additional lower case letters are added to designate special qualities such as a flip over double strike, plated, incuse and so on. The store card system is one which begins with a two letter abbreviation for the state of issue, followed by a three digit number to designate the city of issue. This number may occasionally be used more than once, but with a different state. Following that is an upper case (in need be 2 of them) letter to designate the merchant within that city. Usually the merchants are in alphabetical order, "A" is assigned to the first merchant. Next is a dash, followed by a single, double or triple digit number to designate the die pairing used for that particular token. Lastly, a lower case letter(s) to designate the metal used, and any special qualifiers. The Fuld's system worked so well, and was reasonably expandable, many others created systems derived from the Fuld's system, incoporating at least the state letter identification and some sort of city identifier number. Hetrich and Guttag created an earlier CW token system (H&G numbers) in which they arranged all of the tokens known to them in a logical sequence, and then basically assigned consecutive numbers to them. This system is rarely mentioned any more, except when old collections are found where ids were made long ago. Rulau created a system for pre-1900 U.S. tokens, as did Miller, Low and others. These systems typically bear the appropriate name in front of the number. There are many other systems within exonumia, many covering only the small niche of someone's interest, such as individual state tokens, transits, tax, and nearly anything else that can be thought of.
There are reference books almost without number. You pick the coin - there's a book for it. For gold coinage it's Friedberg - Fr. For US patterns it's Judd - J. For Morgan dollars it's Van Allen and Mallis - VAM - the list goes on and on.
Or it is very possible/likely to have multiple books/systems for a given coin. For instance with the U.S. patterns that GDJMSP mentioned, there are also the Taxay, Davis, Pollock, Breen, Adams-Woodin, and Julian numbering systems that I am aware of.
