Customer Reviews

A Guide Book of United States Coins 2003: The Official Red Book

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While more pictures are always nice, this book gives me everything I was looking for, its well put together and its certainly a great price. I recently inherited a modest coin collection and this book has answered just about every question I had. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who is just getting into the coin collecting hobby.

I bought this book for my husband for Christmas and he couldn't put it down. As a beginner collector of coins he spent hours looking up various prices of coins he had already bought and of coins he wants to buy in the future. It was definitely a great gift!

This work has been printed and re-printed for years. It is well
organized. There is a fair concensus of coins represented.
This book is a "must read" for coin buffs and persons
seeking to establish a fair valuation for any collection.
If you own a coin handbook, eventually it will have to be
replaced in order to keep current with the most recent
evaluations. Yeoman distinguishes between grades of coins,
alphabetic abbreviations and the quantity minted.
For instance, in the year 1909 alone, there are at least
4 different coins. i.e. Lincoln Head, VDB, S and SVDB.
Lastly, the author enunciates U.S. Coin Standards in terms
of diameter, thickness, gross weight, grains and thousandths
(fineness measurement). Purchase this book if you have a coin
collection either large or small.

While this book is a basic text for the beginner to moderatly advanced coin collector the editors have continued to be lax in keeping the book up to date. Failure to include photos of modern commerative coins from mid 1998 to present is inexcusable. Aditionally only the 1999 Statehood quarters are illustrated. Photos of coins, especially popular modern collectibles, are critical to the usefulness of the book. It seems that the book is minimally updated every year, a dissapointment.

As I told in an other review regarding the blue book of US coins, I'm very intersted in the coins and their history; the red book is an exploitation in that world.

This book is good for what it includes, but there is a glaring and shocking omission! There is no info on proof sets, only on some individual coins. With the introduction of state quarter sets, annual proof sets have become a hot commodity, yet this book completely overlooks the entire category!

As another reviewer pointed out, I to was dissapointed by the fact that the latest commerative coins were not included. At first, I thought since these are not very valuable they were excluded. Next, I thought these are the precise coins that new beginners would be looking for when they bought this book. But in conclusion, I think the real problem is timelyness. Each edition is just plain not too timely. That's a shame since time is both knowledge and the advantage one needs to stay on top of the market. This book is not meant to be a history book of the past. I hope the editors get the picture expressed here.