Featured Upcoming Books

Paul Rynearson

Paul Rynearson’s Collecting Ancient Greek Coins is a welcome and fitting addition to Whitman Publishing’s library of world-coin and ancient-coin titles. It joins such books as

• Coins of the Bible (Friedberg),
  
  
• the Handbook of Ancient Greek and Roman Coins (Klawans),
  
  
• Money of the Bible (Bressett),
  
  
• Money of the World: Coins That Made History (Goldberg and Goldberg),
  
  
• Milestone Coins: A Pageant of the World’s Most Significant and Popular Money (Bressett),
  
  
• 100 Greatest Ancient Coins (Berk), and
  
  
• the Guide Book of Overstruck Greek Coins: Studies in Greek Chronology and Monetary Theory (MacDonald).

These books—many of them literary-award winners—reflect Whitman Publishing’s commitment to the field of ancient coins (a commitment dating back to the 1930s, when Whitman first began publishing in numismatics). Individually each of these books is unique in its features and strengths. Combined, they offer an excellent education for the collector, from beginner to intermediate to advanced.

With Collecting Ancient Greek Coins, Dr. Rynearson provides an engaging introduction to many diverse aspects of these fascinating relics. He offers an expert’s valuable guidance to what he calls the “highly personal” act of building your own collection. In more than two dozen essays, Rynearson teaches important lessons in how to get started, how to evaluate quality and value, how to grade ancient coins, and how to catalog and photograph your collection. He discusses forgeries in the marketplace, the risks of cleaning coins, and other concerns for the modern collector. He shares a longtime collector’s wealth of knowledge on coin types, denominations, classifications, and valuations; and a historian’s enthusiasm for coin hoards, famous collections and collectors of the past, symbolism and references on ancient coins, and favorite books for further study.

Having laid a superb foundation, Rynearson next applies his lessons to what might be termed an “action guide” to assembling a personal collection of 25 distinct types of ancient Greek coins. He explores Athenian owls, coins of the Bible, Greek Imperial issues, and other evergreens—those classic coins that collectors have always appreciated, and always will. Combining the talents of a skillful tour guide, a favorite professor, and an observant raconteur, his studies are educational rather than dictatorial. Instead of laying out a rigid, mechanical plan for collecting, he opens hidden doors and illuminates interesting byways. With such a helpful guide and teacher, you will soon be ready to take your own journey, and create a unique, highly personal, and intellectually rewarding collection of ancient Greek coins.

Collecting Ancient Greek Coins will be available in December 2008.