Coin Collection
Coin Collection
What is the best price guide book to find out what your coin collection is worth. Is more expensive better?
I need to price my collection of old coins. Is the more expensive guides any better than the less expensive ones? Or would it be better to take them to a professional appraiser?
A professional appraisal will cost you more than a book, but will be less work for you. A professional appraisal should result in a signed, written document that you could submit to an insurance company.
If your purpose is to just find out what your coins are worth as a matter of curiosity, your best bet is to buy a book and really learn about what you have. Should you ever want to sell your coins, you will do so with knowledge - your best protection in the marketplace.
For US coins the favorite book of coin collectors is The Guidebook of United States Coins by R. S. Yeoman.
Along with prices it will tell you how many coins were minted of each Date From Each Mint, and a summary of the coin's history, designer, size, weight and composition. Collectors refer to this book as "the Red Book", and have done so since its first edition in the late 1940s.
Published annually, the price data is an estimate of what you would pay to buy each coin in each condition listed. Wholesale prices (what you would more likely get if selling a coin) are covered in a companion publication called The Handbook of United States Coins, which is known as "the Blue Book".
One thing to remember is that each of these books provides what amounts to a "snapshot" of prices at the time of publication. Do not depend on the published prices for precision, as the coin market is a dynamic process. Prices change with market demand.
Pricing books like These Are best used as a table of relative values. In other words, you will be able to see which coins of a series are the most valuable, relative to the others.
So the short answer to your question about the best way to evaluate your coins is... spend the time, or spend the money.
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