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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 2340941, member: 19463&quot;]Don&#039;t faint but I&#039;m going to recommend an idea from David Vagi.&nbsp; Before he got in the business of slabbing coins (not my thing, you may recall) he wrote a 2 volume book&nbsp; <b>Coinage and History of the Roman Empire</b>.&nbsp; It took the position that you could list a ruler and provide a price in three grades for their common coins and then list separately a few more desirable coins of that ruler.&nbsp; Sometimes there would be a dozen &#039;special&#039; types; sometimes none.&nbsp; That is correct. Some rulers only had a few types and none of them were any more interesting than the rest while some had a few really good types and a bunch of &#039;somebody standing there&#039; coins.&nbsp; This enabled a book of reasonable (not small by any means) size.&nbsp; I believe he missed the boat for a best seller in a couple ways.&nbsp; The photos were excellent but too few and mostly unlabeled.&nbsp; The book was small and thick but the subject would have been done better if the pages had been two inches wider and all that space filled with photos of coins on that page.&nbsp; I wonder what the effect if the history volume had been sold separately.&nbsp; I liked both to a point but my suggestion for more pictures could have priced the set over the market&#039;s willingness to pay for whichever book they would not read.&nbsp; If I had only one, I would have taken the History because any F, VF, EF priced book is worthless to me since I don&#039;t believe in those grades.&nbsp; What we have is more or less a Red Book for the coins covered but it was too small to beat out Millenium Sear (which has taken forever to complete) and was too complex for the beginner &#039;one per&#039; crowd.&nbsp; I believe going either direction (smaller, larger) with the book would have been more successful.</p><p><br /></p><p>I reviewed it in 2000:</p><p><a href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/book.html#vagi" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/book.html#vagi" rel="nofollow">http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/book.html#vagi</a></p><p><br /></p><p>There is currently a copy of only the Coinage volume on Amazon for $0.41.&nbsp; Someone should buy it.&nbsp; If you later buy both volumes, you can give it to someone.</p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&amp;field-keywords=vagi+david" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&amp;field-keywords=vagi+david" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&amp;field-keywords=vagi+david</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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