Krause can be so frustrating at times

farthing

Sitting here cataloging the minors in the "hoard" and I came across a coin from Egypt. I figured how hard could this be - it's got a portrait of King Farouk on the front and a nice ornamental design on the reverse.

The date is easy - AH 1356/1937. The original owner had listed it on the 2x2 as 1938? with the denomination of 2 ?Milliames? I searched my latest Krause (2006) and could not find it! I did find a 2 at the top of the reverse and the coin is small so I assumed it was a 2 Milliames as the previous owner had guessed but it did not match any of the designs pictured in the entire section for Farouk. Of course, half of the section does not include pictures or descriptions!

I finally pulled out of storage my 2001 backup copy and immediately found the coin, it's actually a silver 2 Piastres! At least it's silver, but I hate how you can never pass on your old Krause catalogues to new collectors for fear that you will be bitten by the problems with the newer catalogues.

ormandh

I also find their references very unreliable. I have made several bad purchases which I made based on mintage figures and values in their only to find that what I paid for was a common coin worth much less than I paid.

coinkat

Old editions have their place with special research questions

spoon

I still have a 1993 edition I bought from LM a few years back and keep by my computer. I like having the two centuries in one book.

SYRACUSIAN

Mistakes such as the previous owner's are common in Arabic coins. Without pretending to know after the posting of the denomination, the metal (silver) should have given it away to an experienced OFEC like you. Fuad and Farouk milliemes and half milliemes are bronze, then cu ni for the 5 milliemes. And I absolutely agree on the need to keep older editions of Krause.

Two years ago, there was a small hoard on the market of wonderful golden specimens of these, (Heaton) of which I bought a few, surprisingly inexpensive, especially the bronze half and one millieme. And I'm saying this as an excuse to post coinpictures' beautiful images.







By coincidence ,my last odd purchase was again an Egyptian half millieme from 1924H, this time a simple BU though.


PS: Reading the dates of Fuad and Farouk coins is easier than older Ottoman Egyptian coins, because they use two different dates, old Arabic ones and current modern dates.
If you look at the top of the reverse, you'll see the date in Arabic, 1352, 1351 and 1352 respectively.
Then at the bottom of the reverse, the dates are modern (1933,1932 and 1933) but in Arabic caracters again with an H at the bottom for the mm. The word millieme is written calligraphically.

coinpictures

You think the books are frustrating, try using Numismaster. It's horrific.

Despite numerous constructive missives on why things are broken and more importantly how they could be fixed and made more usable and intuitive, they've not changed a damned thing.

It's a user interface designed by and for some computer geek in a basement, not people who actually look up coins.

Try searching for a German coin some time. You can't just enter "Germany" as the country. Oh no, that would be too simple. You have to enter (which means know off the top of your head) whether it's "Germany - Weimar Republic", "Germany - Third Reich", or "Germany - Empire". If you choose the wrong one, you get NADA.

Most collectors I know that would be looking up coins don't inherently know which category to choose. And honestly, depending when the coin falls with some of the commems, I invariably get it wrong.

It's a user-hostile search system.

Denominations are inconsistent. Search revisions only work some of the time. None of the existing search information is savable or bookmarkeable. The system fails utterly in Mozilla FireFox. The system times you out after 20-30 minutes, which makes ZERO sense, since none of the search or position information is savable anyway.

If I choose "Canada" as the country and "5 Cents" as the denomination, why does it then take me to a list page that shows "5 Cents", "25 Cents", and "50 Cents" and make me choose AGAIN before I can get to the coins? You already made me choose the denomination once!

Some of the most dain-bramaged coding and interface design I've ever seen.

It's a good idea with a pathetically pi$$-poor implementation. And powers that be unwilling to fix it.