Edmund Kopicki's Work on Polish Coins

ProfessorDeanMoriarity

Hi,
I was wondering if anyone could tell me how useful this book would be to someone who can not read Polish.
I have a Polish-English Dictionary, would this enable me to 'muddle-through'.
Thank you in advance for your assistance.
The Non-Professor

secondrepublic

I think Kopicki's treatise is actually quite useful even for the non-Polish speaker. It has pictures (drawings) of most of the coins, which correspond to the descriptions (though the pictures are in separate volumes from the "text"). The treatise - at least the four-volume version in my library - was published in 1995, so the prices and even some of the rarity description (R5, R4, etc.) are out of date and not consistent with more recent knowledge. For example, Kopicki lists some of the Danzig 1920s proofs are R8s (2 or 3 specimens known), which is definitely not the case. The prices are laughably low for many of the rarer pieces, as compared with today. Nonetheless, overall it is quite useful, and with a Polish-English dictionary, you should be able to use it pretty easily. There's no other work which really covers the waterfront of almost all of Polish coinage, and it doesn't actually have a huge amount of text (per coin) that you would need to translate.

P.S., I would also recommend - if you don't have it already - the Henry Karolkiewicz auction catalogue from 2000 (by Classical Numismatic Group / Karl Stephens), which also has a good amount of useful descriptive history and is written in English.

mrearlygold

Thanks as I'm interested in Polish coins as well and have been struggling a bit to find information.

Now if I can only find the same for Vietnamese material from the 1700's and 1800's.

Any ideas?

Tom

spoon

For all numismatic stuff Vietnamese, this guy's site is a must see! -- http://art-hanoi.com/collection/

He's a friendly guy (who used to have a lot of great ebay auctions) and would likely be able to answer any questions you may have. Kick around his site for a while as he has a lot of good references there. For cash coins this book is a great one: http://art-hanoi.com/toda/

ProfessorDeanMoriarity

Tom,
You may want to join the Polish American Numismatic Association PO Box 56829 Chicago IL 60656-0829
It's $25 a year and they publish a quarterly journal. The journal often deals with modern commemoratives but always has a nice amount of Polish history included as well as some information on older Polish coins and occasionally militaria.

secondrepublic

Does the Polish American Numismatic Association have a website or e-mail?

ProfessorDeanMoriarity

No Website nor e-mail, it is a very traditional (ie Old Fashioned) association. Each quarterly journal is about 12 or so pages normally deals with the history behind the most recent Polish Commemoratives and then normally a more history oriented article: important collections during the partition years, coins of a particular king etc. well worth the $25 to me, at least, as I'm a bit of a Polish history buff.

secondrepublic

thanks for the info, I'm sending in my check today :-)

mrearlygold

<< <i>thanks for the info, I'm sending in my check today :-) >>





Thanks! Me too!

Tom