“Buy the book before the coin” is good, solid, often-quoted advice for newcomers to the hobby. Frankly, it’s guidance for a lifetime of collecting; we should all heed it well beyond the beginner stage. And fortunately for today’s hobbyist, this advice has never been easier to follow—thanks in large part to one incredibly productive author, Q. David Bowers.
Numismatic publishing has experienced a renaissance, an exciting boom, over the past 15 years. Dave Bowers joined forces with Whitman Publishing in 2003 as the company’s numismatic director and as research editor of the Guide Book of United States Coins (the hobby’s best-selling annual price guide and reference, known everywhere as the “Red Book”). He had been a Red Book contributor for years before that, and had helped with other Whitman projects. But it was in 2003 that the relationship was formalized—if a handshake agreement can be called “formal”—and things really took off.
I joined Whitman Publishing myself the following year, as the company’s publisher. I’ve been a coin collector since around age seven, and like any good collector I owned a number of well-read Bowers books, most of them bought directly from his company (at the time, Bowers and Merena Galleries) when I was in my teens and early twenties. Among the Bowers books that traveled with me from my little hometown of Phoenix, New York, to college in Rochester, and later to Atlanta, were his 1987 monograph The Strange Career of Dr. Wilkins: A Numismatic Inquiry; the 1988 reprint of his 1964 classic, Coins and Collectors; and the 13th (!) edition of High Profits From Rare Coin Investment (1991). – Dennis Tucker