Antiques Collectibles Books

We are beginners in the hobby of coin collecting. "United States Coins"
is a great help and we recommend it hightly.

I've relied on older editions of the Official Red Book for information about various coins that I've seen. Having been a coin collector since I was a child, I decided to purchse this book to see what information has changed or been updated. From time to time, I've found unexpected coins in my change and I enjoy being able to look them up to see what they are, what historical period they might represent, etc. It also helps me understand this country's history through its coinage.

This book was just what I was looking for. I have a coin collection that I want to sell and needed to find out the current market value. Easy to read, nice spiral binding.

This price guide covers a lot of coins that aren't covered in coin price magazines. It provides more detail about each coin series in general. It is also a numismatic reference with a wealth of background knowledge and details on many die varieties. Here is some of what you'll find inside:

- High-quality color photos of all coins
- Background info on each coin series
- Prices by grade (although prices aren't shown for the scarcer grades)
- Mintage figures
- Metal composition for each coin variety
- Closeup photos of many major die varieties, especially bust halves

Included are photos, background data, and prices for many coins you won't likely find in other price guides, including:

- Colonial issues
- Post-colonial issues
- Pattern coins
- Commemoratives
- Proof and mint sets
- Bullion coins
- Private and territorial gold
- Private tokens (including Civil War and Hard Times tokens)
- Confederate coins
- Hawaiian coins and tokens
- Philippine issues
- Alaskan tokens
- Mis-strikes and error coins

In addition to the coin listings, there is a wealth of information in the front of the book, including:

- Description of coin grades (no grading photos, though)
- Introduction to, and history of United States Coins
- Checking coins for authenticity
- Famous coin hoards
- Sunken coin treasures

Some of the negatives are as follows:

- Prices for uncommon but certainly not rare coin grades are not included (example: AU and mint state draped bust large cents)
- Intermediate coin grades (example; AU-58, MS-66) are not shown (Coin Values magazine shows these, but Coin Prices magazine does not)
- The coverage of Hard Times tokens, a popular series, is very inadequate

My husband has bought this book for years. He particularly likes the ring binder. Your service was excellent.

Very informative and quite accurate from a price evaluation standpoint.

One problem I have with the book is that the Winchester Model 70 pricing of the rarer calibers is eliminated because they "are rarely seen or sold". I think this is an easy way out of doing some serious research as these guns are also sold on a regular basis.

I've been in the gun business for years as a private buyer/seller/trader and user of firearms. This book is to firearms like the "yellow NADA book" is to cars. The "Blue Book" has 98% of all gun manufacturers, even going back prior to the civil war.
This book has VERY ACCURATE descriptions of the guns and the most trusted pricing range of values that can be obtained. The book gives a detailed pricing/grading scale of which is so very important to have any accuracy. There are other books that help with huge lists of pictures.
Remember one thing: This book is just a guide to help you start the pricing and identifying process. Always consult a professional when possible.
Thank You
Craig A. Wardwell
Craig's Rod & Gun

The Blue Book of Gun Values is a very detailed reference of values of almost any gun ever made. I had no problem locating mine and getting real world values for them. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with firearms to sell before offering them for sale. You may be surprised the worth of your collection.

I have been using The Blue Book of Gun Values as a reference for many years and have been thru at least five editions. The format is generally the same each time and a good one. I use it to find out about guns that I run across at gun shows and in local gun stores. It not not only gives you the value of the firearm but a good bit of it's history. Over the years, each edition is bigger as more arms are added and more information. I find it interesting as well to watch how the value of a firearm goes up. U.S. Winchesters, for example, took a good jump; Colt's, too. The only fault I might find is that it can be tricky finding an individual model in some of the more prolific manufacturers sections as there are so many. Other than that, it's the "go to" reference for most serious and amateur collectors and sellers.

My brother and father decided to sell several of their guns. This book gave an excellant estimation of their value. A couple were real suprises. We found that this book was the main reference of a couple of used gun dealers too. This book saved us from a coupld of expesive errors and paid for itself several times over.

My favorite book by an American author is Lonesome Dove. The other books in that series are also wonderful.

"Books" is not fiction but a look at the author's love of books and collecting books. This may be of more interest to the people with similar interests.

Larry McMurtry's "Books" is very focused on his career as a Bookman, and, as he intended, gives little insight into his life other than as related to this part of his profession. For lover's of books it is a delightful, fast read. I enjoyed finding out about this part of Larry McMurtry's thinking and the fascinating details of "Bookmanship."

It was fascinating to discover that an author of western novels, Larry McMurtry, is also a used book dealer! With a title like this and the McMurtry name, this book will be bought by every librarian looking for a book that encourages readership. Unfortunately, it is a little more specialized than the average reader would expect. If you enjoy collecting, it's a book to borrow from the library. A more accurate title would have been Reminisces of an Antiquarian Book Dealer. From that standpoint, this is a great book! And the format is one that any dealer in antiques and rarities could utilize in writing their memoirs.

After selling over a million used books and still having an inventory approaching 400,000 books (including 28,000 in his personal residence), at age 72, Larry McMurtry must have realized he needed to move some more books or risk a haunting fear that the remaining stock could go for four cents a book! What better way to advertise his bookstore than this description of his book dealing days and his comment that lots of desirable books are still sitting on his shelves carrying prices that are a quarter century old.

What makes this book worthwhile is learning why people collect books and what makes a great library. To Larry, the fun is coming across an important or exciting book he has never owned! This is probably how most dealers in antiquities feel. As he states, "First one has to find such a book; then one has to recognize it for what it is." Unfortunately, rare book investing may not be for everyone. McMurtry gives the example of a book by a Belgian surrealist that he bought as part of a collection of several thousand exhibition catalogues. He quickly resold it for $36. Today, an inscribed copy is estimated to bring at auction, $60,000 to $80,000! Unfortunately, the book may not be for everybody, it is about an exhibition of dolls wrapped in barbed wire!

As often is the case, no dealer can know everything. Sometimes, a rare book is nothing more than a pamphlet. Other times, it's the dust wrapper that brings great value. An example given was a dust wrapper copy of The Great Gatsby that Larry bought forty years ago for $12; just as the most sought after modern books began their spectacular rise. With America now having 946 billionaires running around with money to spend on things of value, McMurtry feels there can be no ceiling and this pricey rarity recently hit $168,000!

McMurtry describes buying real libraries containing thousands of books as alchemy, "One looks, one guesses...." Making a bid you can live with and the seller will accept. Case in point, when starting out, Larry had $1500 in the bank, offered $1500 for a library and when all was done realized $10,000 reselling the books. Another example was hastily appraising a library of 16,000 books at $200,000 for the IRS - a little more than $12 a book. What keeps the reader whipping through is his chapters are so short that you think, "Why not read one more?" After reading this book, the collector/investor realizes it is pretty difficult for the average book lover to put together a rare book library that will grow in value.

Larry McMurtry has had as great an influence on books and movies as any living writer over the last half-century. From THE LAST PICTURE SHOW to LONESOME DOVE, he has penned 30 novels and 41 books, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. As a Hollywood screenwriter he won an Academy Award for Brokeback Mountain and has written 70 scripts.

Who would have guessed, as he tells us in BOOKS: A Memoir, that by the mid-1970s "Writing was my vocation, but I had written a lot, and it was no longer exactly a passion." And this was years before LONESOME DOVE and decades before Brokeback Mountain.

BOOKS: A Memoir is the story of McMurtry's real passion in life: book buying and selling. Over the years he has handled at least a million volumes as a bookseller. He owned a bookstore in Washington, D.C. for 36 years and now has turned his hometown of Archer City, Texas, into a book town where he owns six buildings, five of them filled with books. Indeed, you have a choice of 300,000 volumes to purchase when you enter his store, the appropriately titled Booked Up.

But you probably won't be able to find a latte or scone for sale in the joint. BOOKS: A Memoir is a beautifully written look into the still existing but little known world of antiquarian book dealers. And unfortunately, it soon might be a Lost World, grinded down beneath chain stores and a generation raised on Gameboys, not the Hardy Boys.

This work also gives us insights into the making of a great American writer. Who but McMurtry could write such a perfect sentence: "I don't remember either of my parents ever reading me a story --- perhaps that's why I've made up so many."

There were no books around his Texas ranch house in his earliest years, but then at the age of six, a cousin going off to World War II gave him a treasure --- a box containing 19 books. His life was forever changed. In his isolated rural setting, he tells us, "I came to reading before I came to American popular culture generally..."

McMurtry devoured his cousin's books multiple times and soon, as a young man, was searching through musty old bookstores, looking for books to read. He describes coming across shelves of Modern Library classics in Lovelace's Bookshop in Archer City and being filled "with a mixture of awe and fear." I was reminded of Pete Hamill's description of the awe he felt as a young boy exploring the Brooklyn Public Library and discovering THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. I wonder how much kids lose today when they don't have a similar experience. Not to mention our cultural life.

Soon McMurtry progresses from book scout to bookseller. As a young writer, Hollywood buys one of his early books and turns it into the movie Hud. And instead of purchasing a jazzy car and fancy house, like many of us writers would, his work in films will help him buy all or part of 30 bookstores over the years.

The antiquarian bookseller is like a deep sea fisherman, searching through garage sales, estate sales and auctions for the profitable find. And there is always the big fish that got away, such as when McMurtry sells a rare book, unknowingly for $45, and it ends up later being sold for $5,000.

We meet some of the wonderfully eccentric characters in this world, characters who could easily fill a McMurtry novel. For example, there is the English bookseller Anthony Newnham. McMurtry writes:

"Anthony Newnham tended to marry against type. His first wife, I am told, was a proper English housewife --- thus, in America, he usually went for wild, drug taking, motorcycle girls...Anthony's method...was to marry wild American girls and turn them into proper English housewives --- if they submitted to this change he rapidly lost interest. He was a very attractive man, even though, for a time, he had no front teeth, these having been knocked out by a cricket ball when he was nine. He lost his bridge and, for some years, didn't bother to replace it."

There are gems of great writing like this throughout the book. And we learn that in all his decades of operating a major bookshop in the Georgetown district of the nation's capital, "we sold only one real book to a member of Congress." Now there is a shock!

But for as much joy as there is in this book about books, there is also a subtle sadness. After all, the antiquarian book dealer makes his living when people die and their precious libraries are broken up and sold by relatives. McMurtry calls this "the silent migration of books." Then, there is the death of independent bookstores all over the country, driven out of business by the ubiquitous chains. Great old stores like Discover in San Francisco, the Heritage Book Shop in Los Angeles and the Phoenix Bookshop in New York City appear in these pages. All gone forever, part of the Lost World. Even McMurtry's own shop in DC eventually gave way to a Pottery Barn of all insults.

McMurtry writes a simple yet beautiful sentence to describe when family members end up breaking up personal libraries that took years of hard labor to amass and gave endless satisfaction to their owners: "Something was over, and that was that."

But for those of us who have made a living in the word business, McMurtry's wonderful little book comes at a time when we, unimaginably, find ourselves thinking not about retirement plans but whether books and their cousins in serving civilization, newspapers, may be the thing that is over. So far in 2008, 6,000 journalists have lost their jobs and some newspaper stocks have dropped by 84% over the past year. The San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million a week. The business is dying.

And for those of us who must supplement our writing income not by selling books but by teaching college kids, we soon learn the depressing truth of America in 2008: young people are not reading either newspapers or books. McMurtry acknowledges this:

"I nowadays have a feeling that not only are most bookmen eccentrics, but even the act they support --- reading --- is an eccentricity now, if a mild one." But he remains optimistic about the future. He writes, "Very quickly, once I had my 19 books, I realized that reading was the cheapest and most stable pleasure in life. Sometimes books excite me, sometimes they sustain me, but rarely do they disappoint me --- as books, that is, if not necessarily the poetry, history, or fiction that they contain."

One can only hope that another young person will one day wander into one of the musty old bookstores remaining, pick up a book that has existed for centuries and be filled with awe and captivated by the magic that is books. Upon that child, the fate of this democracy and perhaps even our civilization may just depend.

For anybody who loves books and reading, BOOKS: A Memoir will be a great read and a treasured addition to your personal library.

--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

The IDEA of a book about books by Larry McMurtry is utterly compelling. The moment I saw it, I "one-clicked" it. The editorial reviews which describe the book as being what the common McMurtry lover (me) expected, must have scanned the first 30 or so pages and written on reputation. This is a bewilderingly awful book, for all the negative reasons mentioned in other reviews.

We were impressed with the presentation layout of this
State Quarter Collector Map. Our grandsons will
enjoy their learning experiences more with something
that is actually interesting to look at. (I learned
something from this...........which shows you
that you can teach an old dog new tricks!!!) I
would highly recommend this item.

Terrific product. The book looks great, the map idea is a nice learning tool, and mainly, the quarters fit perfectly. We've seen some that are terrible to get the coins in. Also, the facts about each state are great.

My friend who has excellent taste was very pleased with these quarter holders I ordered for her to give her grandchildren. She liked the map and the quality of the folder. They arrived at her house before I got a chance to tell her that they were shipped.

This collector map is absolutely beautiful. I'm really impressed with the quality and sturdiness of this product. The color and detail are wonderful. The little tidbits of info are great as well as educational. My dad has been collecting the quarters for my 11-year-old daughter and I ordered this for her. They put them in together today and had a great time. My dad has a different map and likes this one better so I'm ordering one for him now. It's an awesome map and you really can't beat the price! You won't regret purchasing this item.

This finally came after being out of stock forever, and I love it! The size is a little bit awkward, but I love the full color US map and all of the extra info about each state. They have also updated it and replaced the four slots for "your favorite quarters" with six slots for the territories to be released in 2009! A really lovely way to display the state quarters.

Product arrived in a timely manner and was what I was looking for except that it did not mention that the holder had spots for states for both minted cities. I wish it had mentioned that in the description. It was a very good deal! :)

This isn't fancy, but it works quite well for holding our collection. It has places for quarters from the Philadelphia mint as well as the Denver mint. Sure makes you pay a bit more attention to your change!

I really liked this product. It is nicely made, and provides a lot of interesting information about each state. Some of the quarters were hard to get in, but if you push against them with your thumb, it works well. And once the quarters are in, they don't fall out, unlike with other folders. I would definitely recommend it to others.

This has to be my favorite coin folder yet. It has a slot for both P and D mintages and the coins fit into the slots perfectly (unlike the presidential coin folder by whitman.) I highly recommend it. :)

This is a well made product but I didn't realize that it was for the state quarters that come from BOTH mints. I would have been happy with one that held only one set of coins but that is my fault for not reviewing the product details closely enough. If you want to collect the coins from both mints (Philadelphia and Denver respectively) this is a good product. I am new to this so I don't know if there are other folders that allow you to get the coins out or to adjust them once they are in the slots, but this one makes it very difficult to adjust the coins once they are in.

I would recommend this for anyone interested in wine from the novice to Robert Parker (I'm betting he has a copy). Four friends have purchased this book after looking at mine.

The Oxford Companion to Wine is a great encyclopedia for wine lovers. It covers a great breadth of topics, deeply enough to be informative, but in a short enough fashion to keep this under 1000 pages. Coverage includes wine growing regions, wines, vine varietals, wine making, barrel making, bacteria, and on and on.

One thing this is not - it's not a review/criticism of specific wines (which tend to become out of date too quickly to be useful in book form).

Highly recommended.

Along with most of the reviewers here, my wine-knowledgeable friends, to whom I gave this book as a wedding anniversary present, were extraordinarily pleased. They tell me that they learn something new from it every day, and that it has "everything about wine" within its covers.

I have been working in the wine industry for many years and I have never come across a more complete reference book. It is worth every cent.The Oxford Companion to Wine, 3rd Edition

The Oxford Companion to Wine is one of the best books about wine that I have seen.

This was great! I bought two! One for me and one for my brother who is turning 40 this year. Everything that brings me back to my childhood when I collected them. A real find for Wacky Packages fans!

Now I have that stupid song stuck in my head. But this little gem of a book brought back a lot of laughs long stifled since my childhood. We went nuts for Wacky Packages and we swapped and we traded and we bartered and all of that stuff. My neighbor had some real old vintage ones on her refrigerator that I would go crazy for. But it seems like they haven't included ALL of them. There has to be a sizable number of images that didn't make it into this book. Perhaps I'm mistaken and this book only offers up a few volumes in the series....I know there is stuff that I had that's missing from this book. But - anyway, if you grew up in the 60's and early 70's and you remember purchasing these things for 10 cents or so, this is a wonderful book that looks back on adolescence and hits the funny bone hard. It's short on words and descriptions, but that's fine. The laugh-out-loud images are enough. This book brought a huge smile to my face that didn't go away for a long time. It brought back a wave of great memories and for that, it's worth twice the price!!! I love it!

This book may be one of the most pointless things I ever needed to have. The production is gorgeous, down to the waxy Topps paper the dustcover is printed on. If you're looking for a lot of scholarly insight it's not here. Art Speigelman's brief intro tells you everything you need to know, the rest is pictures of the stickers. For a designer, this book is pure inspiration - wacky wordplay, pastiche, essence of package design, etc. And the price is terrific.

I was born in Philadelphia and when I was growing up in the 60's, one of my vices was.......Wacky Packages! These fun sticker trading cards were like "crack" to kids in my neighborhood! The twisted parodies were all done by some very famous artist and today the stickers can empty your wallet faster than you can chew bubble gum!

I am a collector of many things and I am also a complete-ist! Which would make collecting these stickers very expensive! I collect Monster and Super Hero statues, figures, magazines, trading cards, films, and way too much more! I also collect other items from my youth and I was going to venture into Wacky packages, but after some research, I found it would be too costly to complete the collection.

There is also a lot you need to know before you start buying/collecting these cards, spotting counterfeits and re-released versions is just part of the chaos and then finding them in good condition from reputable sellers is another.

This book will solve the problem for most nostalgia hunters and definitely for me! The book is laid out so that every sticker is presented on it's own page. The pictures are beautiful and clear and are in order of release separating each series with a divider page. It's a sweeeet little book that measures 7 1/2" tall and 5 3/4" wide and the dust jacket looks like a Wacky Packages wrapper to boot!

This Hard cover book has very little text and only covers the first 7 series of cards, but it's well worth the price if you like these stickers. I can only hope that there will be a second volume with series 8 through 16 included! I'll buy it and I'm sure anyone who bought this volume will too!

As a bonus there is a collectors pack of four classic "Wacky Packs" stickers! Very Cool!

This is (at least one of) the logical extensions of Warhol, to the extent that the representation and/or the "idea" of the product is theoretically no different than the product itself. Actually, it's more interesting than Warhol; it's satire that is automatic, mass produced, and not the least bit funny.

Yes, the reproductions are unreasonably beautiful, and I'm not just saying that because I had a Wacky Packages fetish when I was a kid. "Hawaiian Punks" has always been my favorite. There is something about the red and green mushed-up glob of a former human being, as he seems to ooze off the sticker, that is just as transfixing to my adult eye as it was to my far less discriminating 10-year-old self.

This is cultural detritus raised to an utterly undeserved level. I feel like tearing all of the pages out and framing them properly. The apocalypse will be arriving when?

Gary Vaynerchuk.

I admit, I never would have recognized this name two years ago. But in two very short years (perhaps less) this name and the wine-infused, palate-drenching, non-traditional approach to wine his name symbolizes has had an infectious effect on wine consumers world wide. I had the pleasure of meeting Gary just before the wild fire was set and ever since the first Wine 2.0 event my appreciation and respect for Gary has grown tremendously.

Gary would be the first to admit that he's not a Rhodes scholar and didn't study English at Oxford, and as you might guess, neither have I. He chose video as his medium because he is raw, unrefined, reactionary, and as in your face "Jersey" as it gets.

After seeing Gary on Conan the second time, I asked myself if Gary could ever enter the mainstream wine drinker channels, e.g. Gary giving his two cents on wine in the Wall Street Journal or NY Times? To do that, Gary would have to be able to string a conscious, coherent stream of impulses to text-something that rarely happens, as his type of enthusiasm is hard to lasso to text. However, Vaynerchuk's book, 101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder To Your World comes across as genuinely Gary as possible and is a great read for any wine drinker who has ever wanted more from their wine review!

Gary's genuine lack of finesse, lack of snobbery, and most importantly, lack of boring moments, comes straight through in his book with wine review titles like "Oak Monster Be Damned," and `risque' topics like "Red Wine with Fish." Read it cover to cover, browse it from the toilet, or use it for inspiration when you find a wine that really brings the thunder - but whatever you do, get yourself a copy!

This book far exceeded my expectations, broght a thunder of enjoyment, and contributed yet more valuable knowledge and tidbits to my understanding of the wine world. Gary offers every description in a fun and easy to read, down-to-earth, interest catching manner and language. Besides the fact that in my opinion this book is so good, spreading also the writer's exquisite taste in choosing this wine list, I must enrich this concept by adding that Gary Vaynerchuk is the most influential person in my life, as far as my relationship with wines go. That is also to say that this young man clearly promises to be the next generation Robert Parker, or wine authority of that scope.

this is a book about joy...words like "Inspire" and "Delight" accurately describe the contents of the book..after starting to read wine reviews (and collecting wines) 25 years ago, I gave up; the previous wine commentaries all sounded like clinical reviews of new drugs; I found no joy in reading the "taste list" of samplings and felt stupid. Gary V has it right..wine (and wine tasting) should be a passion, a new experience, something fun, something to be shared..the comments in the book sound just like those on his PODcast(check it out). He will show you how to enjoy new tastes. Buy the book and read it. Mark the pages about the wines which you might be interested in. Start watching the show. Visit your local wine store regularly. You will forever be changed..

Great book to give wines that are solid a boost that they would never get in the Robert Parker world.

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3SK7UFPK9STIH Gary Vaynerchuk's 101 Wines: Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World is a great, fun book that talks about wines you should try. Fast read, and I learned a lot from Gary. Funny headlines and copy too. Not your typical wine review book. I don't even drink wine! My wife loved it. Found a wine she absolutely loves now.

While useful and informative and, indeed, a must if you buy coins, this book is quite outdated. Since the price of gold and silver have gone up considerably and change daily, the effect on coins is intense in many cases.

There are several sites online where you can get more up-to-date information. Yet having this handy is a good idea. I like having something near my work area and in my hands so I can quickly look up the information I want. Then I can follow that up by going to one of the Web sites.

-Susanna K. Hutcheson

This handbook (The Blue Book)provides a good target price representing dealer's cost for all the US Coins listed in the corresponding retail value Red Book. Invaluable reference tool for quick evaluation of a seller's coin price markups for the casual collector who doesn't need up to the minute price changes. Use it with the Red Book to establish a range for buying and selling.

The Bluebook is an invaluable reference when you are selling coins (along with the Redbook when buying) since it tracks what coin dealers pay for coins. You need to keep in mind that in a "hot" market prices change rapidly which can make the Bluebook "dated" fairly quickly. In any case it does provide a baseline indicating what others have received for coins in specific grades over the past several months giving some indication of what you should receive from a coin dealer.

If you are interested in what you can expect to pay for a coin you want to buy then use the Redbook which tracks the amount dealers charge for coins in specific grades.

The difference between the Redbook and Bluebook indicates the monies retained by dealers for the value they add to collector's trades. So, if you are trading collector-to-collector with no dealer involved, the two references can serve as the high and low bar for the negotiation process.

Easy to use
Contains all information you need to assess any coin
A wise purchase

This book is nice to use when you are wanting to sell one of your coins. It would be a better book if it would come in spiral bound so that it is easier to use.