ISBN:079481943-5
Advertised Price: $17.95
If you have read any of Q David Bowers books in “the Official Redbook” series you have some Idea what to expect from this book. I have to admit that I didn’t have much interest in Morgan dollars, but over the holidays one of the National dealers ran an ad offering a number of the books in this series for a significant discount. Wanting to continue to build my Numismatic Library I decided to pick up this volume and one other.
When I received the two books I discovered the Dealers Gimmick… they reproduced their full page add as a sticker and placed them over all of the other advertisements in the book! This ingenious advertising ploy is actually not an issue except for the one page where the wrinkled a sticker when applying it and the page doesn’t lie flat. The book is written in Bowers’ Friendly and engaging style, and as typical of his books in this series there is a lot of background material before he gets around to the Date by Date analysis of the series.
He begins with an “about the Author” Page (curiously one of the pages that the dealer chose to cover with a sticker), and then after a few pages of Credits, Acknowledgements, Forward and Introduction, Launches into an exhaustive discussion of the History, Economic Factors and Politics associated with the Development of the Silver dollar, and the factors that lead to the production of Millions of these dollars year by year, only to have them immediately bagged and unceremoniously dumped into storage at the various mint Facilities, not to see the light of day for decades or in some cases for the better part of a century.
The story is so fascinating that one doesn’t even notice that you’ve read to page 111 of a 288 page book before arriving at the section the covers the analysis of each year by date and Mint Mark. But the fun doesn’t end there. Throughout the Detail analysis section (where he devotes one full page to each date and mint mark) Mr. Bowers’ inserts a series of Two Page Vignettes (28 all totaled) titled “Morgan Silver dollars, Rare Coins, and Life in year XXXX”. In these short sections, he continues a year by year discussion of the economic climate and the politics of Dollar production as well as the Coin Hobby/Rare coin Business at the time, finishing the section with a few paragraphs titled “Meanwhile, on the American Scene in XXXX” which constitutes a mini history lesson. While I’m still not much interested in collecting Morgan dollars, I found the book and incredibly interesting History lesson and a very enjoyable read!