BAD News: 2nd Edition of Bower's Red Book on Double Eagles Finally Out....But.....
GoldFinger1969
Posts: 3,402 ✭✭✭✭✭
Whitman is finally putting out a 2nd Edition of the 2004 1st Edition. 312 pages vs. 288....new intro by John Dannreuther....available mid-February.
It will be great to have an updated 2nd Edition with new population, pricing, and scarcity data and comments, even if they are still off a bit compared to the latest internet data. I think it's great to have 1 book cover both types of Double Eagles, Liberty Heads and Saint-Gaudens. As someone who just made their first purchase of a Liberty Head DE at FUN 2026, I wouldn't have minded having the book's key points on a few coins I was looking at.
I suspect there may be new story chapters in-between yearly/mint mark reviews of coins, and maybe a few 1-line additions/updates.
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Book is now up on the Whitman site....should be out end of April, you can pre-order:
https://whitman.com/red-book-series-2-double-eagle-gold-coins-2nd-edition/?srsltid=AfmBOorpyuOr_VFeU4ywDEi4cR-CcdcClWsL_zxRBSXmiw_V77kaO19Q
BOWERS ‘ - not Bower’s. Dave’s last name is Bowers, not Bower.
Grammar School level punctuation taught.
Website now says that May 5th is the expected release date...so the exact release date is in flux, but it should be very soon.
You can pre-order the Double Eagle book right now.
Has anybody gotten their copy yet ?
Disappointment City.........well, I got my 2nd Edition of Bower's DOUBLE EAGLE GOLD COINS the prior weekend and I have to be honest: it's a BIG disappointment.
I am not angry or upset with David Bowers, who is getting up there in age. Not even John Danreuther, although I would have hoped he would have demanded or asked for more informative data and commentary. I think what happened is Whitman Publishing tried to do the right thing -- get a 2nd Edition out -- and did a bad job of it from what I have seen so far from the book (haven't read it cover-to-cover yet, but spotchecks indicate a major issue, see below).
I only have 1 edition of the Morgan Silver Dollar book, which I believe is now on the 8th Edition...so I don't know what changes there are edition-to-edition which averages about every 3-4 years for an update. The DOUBLE EAGLE GOLD COINS 2nd Edition comes out 22 years after the 1st Edition and from what I've seen from my 1st skim (yes, I will do more work) the ONLY thing that has changed is the number of pages (the reason why, below) and the gold prices. Otherwise, it looks like one big, giant, cut-and-paste job.
That's NOT what I wanted after waiting 15 years for a 2nd Edition.
The type is bigger in this book which is probably what explains why the pages went from 288 to 326.
The gold prices have been updadated, though the number of grades with prices has been cut back from 17 grades to 7. Sometimes the 1st Edition didn't have prices for all those grades but for those coins with prices changing across the spectrum it was nice to see. It involves lots of number and data crunching but with today's technology and archived results, it's doable. RWB did it for his book !!
The range estimates for each coin's Population Census looks to be EXACTLY the same as from 2024....this is a HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT and probably the key data point I expected to see updated. The 1st Edition had 18 years of data from the time the TPGs were created back in 1986. It's been 24 years since that 1st Edition. This was really unacceptable to me. You HAVE to take into account all the hoards and coins that have come out the last 24 years from 2004-26....the HUGE increase in TPG Graded Coins.....better methods to guestimate raw coins still with many individual's (some folks here who go to Estate Sales and other off-the-tracks places where small hoards come out can attest to this...plus Fairmont !!). Yet it looks like all they did was copy-and-past from the 2002 1st Edition.
Instead of having the Hoard Stories interspersed with the Yearly Coin Reviews...they are all at the end of the book which I disagree with but can live with. I liked the stories breaking up the monotony of coin-after-coin analysis and review. Roger Burdette's Saints book and the 1st Edition have it right: use the sections to give the book a change-of-pace and to reflect happenings at various calendar dates.
The only thing I see that is totally new is the inclusion of the Greysheet GSID code for each coin, which may or may not be something useful. I'm not even sure what the thing is, to be honest.
1 or 2 new sentences of commentary on each of the coin reviews would have been nice and not taken up much time. Surely, 22 years had to change the data set and population census for a few coins in certain grades, and that doesn't even include Gradeflation. A couple of researchers doing online archive Population data, talking to dealers, collectors, researchers, etc....could have done new work on both the Saints (where Roger's 2018 estimates remain the gold standard, no pun intended and especially on the less discussed Liberty Head DEs.
Looks like a gold price of $5,500 was used to price the coins, which is really right at the January 2026 peak probably before they went to print. The text commentary during the Acknowledgements cites $4,500 which was the price a month earlier, I guess.
I guess the 1st Edition was no longer readily available AFAIK....price on the secondary market had been pretty premium-priced....so at LEAST we have plenty of the 2nd Edition for folks who want a primer that covers both types of Double Eagles. That book is clearly this 2nd Edition....it just could have been so much more.
most info won't change. better to enumerate what changes you want to see as above
The most glaring errors were:
*No updates to the population census for each coin, probably the #1 reason to buy the book behind the commentaries.
*No changes to the commentaries themselves despite tons of new information on virtually all the coins (or at least most of them) including new hoards, new levels of scarcity/rarity, price changes, high-grade population changes, etc.
*No new section on the collectors of Double Eagles or new information where there are lots of new information like on the SSCA shipwreck and all the changes there on Type 1 DEs.