AUTHOR'S NOTE ON THE COIN COLLECTOR'S SURVIVAL MANUAL

The Coin Collector's Survival Manual®, Seventh Edition was published by Random House in 2010. A reprint of that five-year-old edition, the Revised Seventh Edition, was published by Penguin Random House in September 2015.

Reviewer Michael Bugeja mistakes my "revised" edition – a reprint with some updates – for a new edition.

In software language, this is Version 7.1, not 8.0.

The Coin Collector's Survival Manual, Sixth Edition (2008) has 373 pages with a 16-page color insert.

The extensively overhauled Seventh Edition (2010) has 401 numbered pages with a 16-page color insert and 239,384 words.

There are 178 updates in the 2015 reprint. But, remember, this is not the Eighth Edition. So that there would not be the kind of confusion that the reviewer creates, the publisher assigned both books the same ISBN number.

Significant updates were made within the confines of making changes to pages without disrupting the pagination. These updates had to be made with the precision of a jigsaw puzzle.

I have decades of experience in publishing revised editions of books. It's an art to be able to remove a paragraph from a page and replace it with another paragraph of exactly the same length. This can update and refresh an entire section of a book, but to the casual observer it might appear that no change was made. Another way to include an update is to add material at the end of a chapter or any place else where a blank space exists. Changes of this style make it cost-effective to update a book.

In fact, the Revised Seventh Edition is remarkably up-to-date for a reprint of a five-year-old edition. Important revisions generally fall within the same sections and pages so that a new index is not required and the page numbering remains intact. These can be found in: Chapter 5: "Grading Services and the Plastic Revolution"; Chapter 6: "New Services Land A 1-2 Punch to Protect You"; Chapter 10: "A Grade Leap Forward"; Chapter 12: "Registry Sets Get High Grades"; Chapter 15: "Buying Coins on the Internet and by Mail"; Chapter 18: "Don't Let Uncle Sam Pick Your Pocket" (the newest tax and estate-planning secrets are included, with every bit of tax advice revised and updated by leading tax and legal experts for 2015 and beyond); Chapter 22: "Using the Legal System to Protect Your Coins"; Chapter 23: "Don't Turn Your Valuables Into Fool's Gold"; and Appendices.

Buying coins over the Internet still entails serious perils and pitfalls for inexperienced collectors. So it is no mistake that I beef this up and leave warnings from previous editions intact about buying coins online.

It isn’t Michael Bugeja’s critical comments that concern me; he also has some nice things to say about the basic book. Rather, it’s his failure to recognize The Coin Collector's Survival Manual, Revised Seventh Edition for what it is – and what the title says it is: a revision of the Seventh Edition.

For more information, or to order, see:
The Coin Collector’s Survival Manual, Revised Seventh Edition (www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/203013/the-coin-collectors-survival-manual-revised-seventh-edition-by-scott-a-travers/9780375723391/)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
BOOK REVIEW: COIN COLLECTORS SURVIVAL MANUAL, 7TH ED. (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v18n51a07.html)

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