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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;aronsamma, post: 1825157, member: 39613&quot;]I have <i>The Official Red Book: A Guide Book of Buffalo and Jefferson Nickels</i>. It wasn&#039;t on your list, but if you&#039;re interested, this is my review:</p><p><br /></p><p>The idea of the book is to take you year-by-year through the buffalo and Jefferson nickel series, giving specifics about strike, luster, general eye appeal, and pricing. It&#039;s really interesting for serious collectors, and it recommends an ideal grade for each date for buffalo nickels that balances price and value. It also has a lot of behind-the-scenes information about the minting process, and why certain years are more available than others.</p><p><br /></p><p>But there are some major problems. One is all the typos and spelling errors. There are a lot, and it&#039;s very distracting. It makes me question some of the content of the book, because you never really know if something was put under the wrong year. One part, in particular, lists the &#039;sharp&#039; and &#039;full&#039; strike percentage of buffalo nickels. In most cases, it&#039;s annotated something like this: (10% + 2%). But for about half of them, it&#039;s written (10% 1 2%). I was confused by this for a while before realizing that the &quot;1&quot; is supposed to be a &quot;+&quot;. Of course, I could be wrong, but if so, that just goes to show that it isn&#039;t very clear.</p><p><br /></p><p>The other major problem is the lack of illustration. For buffalo nickels (my primary interest), Bowers strongly recommends buying the sharpest strike possible, noting that they will probably be more valuable some day, and can be bought for similar prices to poorly-struck examples of the same grade. This is good advice. The problem is, &quot;Full Details&quot; coins are described only in text, and in a quotation from another author, at that! This is a MAJOR point in the book. Saying &quot;look for the line that goes upward and slightly left from the braid&quot; is much less effective than simply showing a picture with an arrow pointing at it. And saying &quot;look for full details in the fur&quot; is meaningless without a picture of what full details should look like. </p><p><br /></p><p>All that said, I&#039;m not sure there&#039;s a better reference work available for buffalo nickels. Considering that you can buy this for about $3 used on Amazon, it&#039;s not a major investment.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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