I just received a copy of the Chinese edition of my last book. It is so cool. I can't wait to show it to my son, Paul, when he comes home for Thanksgiving. Paul is fluent in Mandarin so he can tell me how it reads in translation.

Three translators and two editors from the China Financial publishing house which is a division of the People's Bank on this project with COTY founder Cliff Mishler. We also had two designers clean up most of the photos and published in a new size handy to carry. The retail price was only USD 10 we paid USD 9 for the printing alone, so this should help promote the collecting of world coins in china!

I am pretty proud of it. I actually like the smaller, paperback format better than the hard cover that Krause did. We are talking about a new, updated edition in English and I am pushing to do it the same size as the Chinese edition and include more information about the artists, and the denomination, year and mintmark varieties for each of the coins. As I suspected it might, collecting Krause COTY winners is becoming a popular way to collect world coins.

Between 2100 and 2500 new world coin designs come out every year. It is impossible to collect them all. With so much material, collectors need a way to narrow it down so they can create a coherent collection. A collection of "world coins I like" does not have any unity beyond individual taste. There is no universality to it and no concept of completion. That is why people collect by topic--medical, aviation, animals, etc... Now that collectors are armed with an easy to carry book they can collect COTY coins in all categories or in just one of the categories. Excluding the gold coins, not many coins in the series cost more than $100 each right now. Only a few of them like the 2004 China gold 2,000 Yuan Maijishasn Grottoes "best gold" coin or the set of four 2006 palladium Canadian constellation coins are non-collectable.

Since 2012, the Krause judges have become mindful of the mintages and the cost of big precious metal coins and seldom, if ever, nominate them. It is not likely that there will be other non collectable coins in the COTY series. That is good news for the collectors who are choosing to collect the series.