No comments about Collector Car Restoration Bible: Practical Techniques for Professional Results.

5 comments about Florence's Big Book of Salt & Pepper Shakers: Identification & Value Guide.

1. I almost didn't buy this book since the reviews were fairly low, but thumbed through it twice upon receiving it...I think it one of the best books in my collection. It covers most materials used in making S&Ps, identifies a lot of the makers, (Shawnee, Occupied Japan, Hazel Atlas, etc.), the photography is good, & I'm very pleased with the information it has given me. I know it will become a well thumbed book for searching.



2. Book was a big hit with a growing collector - some shaker's categories could be expanded upon with more detail and photos - but overall a success...



3. This was the first book I bought on Salt and Pepper Shakers. I didn't find it helpful at all. Unless you just want a collection of S&P books, don't waste your money.



4. The book has tons of pictures. Some of the sets shown are not "true" sets. It is a great book to get a general idea of all the many themes of salt and pepper collecting. High end and low end are all well represented. It was fun to see sets I never knew existed that I would like to have. It gave me more stuff to look for in auctions. It's always fun to add to collections!



5. The monetary valuations of Salt & Pepper Shakers in this book are virtually useless to either a collector or seller. I have never seen a book so totally unresearched on both pricing and product description. The majority of the photos of the S&P's do not describe the material utilized in their construction, so one is left wondering if they are looking at plastic, metal or other material.
   No person interested in Salt & Pepper collecting should buy this as their first book. If you do, you'll be in for a big surprise when you try to buy an S&P that has been valued in this book for $12, but is belling for $48.
   For the more seasoned collector, it does have some decent pictures, but is more or less a rehash of better produced S&P Collecting books.
   If you've been collecting S&P's for over 6 months, you'll realize that this is a piece of utter tripe; execpt for the photos of the S&P's.

5 comments about Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1. The author Danny Danziger has skillfully edited a series of 52 interviews with a diverse group of curators, support staff, trustees, and the Met's Director Philippe de Montebello. The result is a vivid picture of an institution, with many fascinating life stories and thoughtful comments on the museum from very different but all compelling points of view.



2. This book is mostly a series of condensed and edited interviews with the staff of the Metropolitan. Anyone looking to get the big picture or a great narrative like Calvin Tompkins provided in 'Merchants and Masterpieces' will be disappointed, as I was. All of the interviews provide interesting little nuggets of information, and a few are really fun to read (the best one is with the museum's director, Philippe de Montebello, who seems like a total gent) but all of them could have been trimmed back by about half. This book is mostly padding. And with so many people talking about their jobs without any sense of context, you begin to wonder what the point of this book is. It seems like a memento for people who work at the Met, not a book directed to outside readers. Maybe Danziger was going for the kind of effect that Studs Terkel gets with some of his interview books, like "Working," but Danziger, who is basically voiceless for most of the book, doesn't direct the conversations to big themes the way Terkel can. Basically, you should only read this if you are Met Museum groupie. Otherwise skip it.



3. I must say that I'm surprised by all of the great reviews this book has been given. Its simply ok. The Met is one of my favorite places to visit and reading the description of this book I went into it thinking I would love it. I was sadly mistaken. In fact I couldn't wait to finish reading it.
   
   The author clearly researched his topic well, interviewing countless people in each of the Mets departments but none are presented in an intriguing way. Each person that is profiled is the subject of their own little chapter but the author never goes in depth into the person's job at the Met. Take for instance the fact that we learn that the head custodian is a recovering coke addict but not what goes in to keeping such a massive institution running. We meet curators and learn of their passion for their field or for say baseball but never what goes into their daily job as a curator in the greatest museum in North America.
   
   Really a dissapointment with very little if any redeeming qualities. The book might as well have been about an athlete and ask nothing about their sport or an astronaut and ask them nothing about NASA.



4. This is one of those books that while you are reading you hate to come to the end because it is so well-written and inspiring. Having gone to the Met many times, it was delightful to read about the behind-the scenes happenings. I very much like the fact that the author painted such a broad scope of people whom he interviewed from the plumbers, waitresses, curators, members on the board of directors and the people whose relatives have given millions in acquisitions.
   
   This is a wonderful book and a must-read for anyone who appreciates art.



5. What a rich, generous, amazing book! Perhaps fifty different people from curators through trustees, security people, and cleaning staff show us how they all work together to make one of the greatest museums in the world. From the extremely wealthy trustee to the waitress with aching feet, it shows the human faces behind the priceless art in New York's Metropolitan Museum. We know about the life of Van Gogh; now we can learn about the people who serve the place which keeps his work safe for the world to see. To the author: thank you so much!

No comments about The Official Blackbook Price Guide to United States Paper Money 2009, 41st Edition (Official Blackbook Price Guide to United States Paper Money).

5 comments about Winchester: An American Legend : The Official History of Winchester Firearms and Ammunition from 1849 to the Present.

1. This book is an eye opener for sure! Okay it is a coffee table book rather than a serious reference work, but hey, you cannot deny the shear luminous beauty of the photography and the well thought out layout and design. There is good info to be had as well, this book is a 'faster' reference than Madis' work and leaves you hungry for more. Well done Mr Wilson, I will be buying more of your work!



2. the next best thing to owning a winchester rifle itself.
   
   excellent in every respect and well recommended.



3. Just the pictures in this huge volume are enough to make it worth thumbing through, but the written information is tremendous and the author manages to cover all connections to Winchesters' Fathers, including John M Browning, my personal hero (other than my Father, Uncle, Grandfather and all other veterans of WWII and Korea). Probably not all the information on Winchester firearms and ammo history but all that I can absorb and still have a social life.



4. Beautiful to look at. Not heavy in the way of company or technical history, but what a great coffee table book. Costly - if you can find it - but wow!




5. R.L. Wilson, who wrote this book, also wrote one called 'Colt, an American Legend.' Both books are exquisite, coffee table size--eight and a half inches by eleven inches (landscape)--and each are over 400 pages, almost every page filled with extremely high quality color photographs.

   R.L. Wilson, in addition to being a collector and well-known author in the firearms field, is a historical consultant to Colt's Firearms Division.

   The subtitle on the first page says, "The official history of Winchester firearms and ammunition from 1849 to the present," which pretty much covers the entire history of the Winchester Firearms Company (now known as U.S. Repeating Arms, since a bankruptcy and change of ownership.)

   If you are a Winchester aficionado, or just a Western history buff, with an interest in "The Gun That Won the West," this is a book you will want in your library.

   It is one of my favorite books. It will probably be one of yours, also.

   Joseph Pierre,
   Author of THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS: Our Journey Through Eternity

5 comments about How to Make Money in Coins Right Now, 2nd Edition.

1. This book was laid out in a way that you could follow and understand. Very informative.



2. This was a good book except there were no real ideas except to break out your coins from the already sealed and graded plastic cartridges and resend them back to have them graded again hoping they will upgrade their already graded grade. Hopefully, in breaking the protective case, you don't scratch them getting them out. To me, that was expensive and taking a chance on their judgement. There were no real hints that I could use other than what I was already doing.



3. While well-written, this book comprises of one theme throughout: cracking older PCGS graded coins and re-submitting them in the hope of a higher rating and a higher value. The book is very well detailed in this respect, but many of the older holders have long ago been cracked and re-submitted. Very little in other advice as far as making a profit.



4. When you buy these kinds of books, you tend to expect some secret techniques of making money. Many books even manage to create the impression of telling you something previously undisclosed, until you try it and realise that it does not work.
   
   This book is written by the professional in this field. Making money in coins is a business, and not such an exciting one, after all. There are a few ways of making a profit honestly (or almost honestly) in numismatics. And there is no guarantee of being succesful. Very sobering message, and this book gets it across well.
   
   I learned a lot from this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in this business.



5. I bought this book with the idea of picking up some investment coins, salting them away for a few years, and cashing out. While that may indeed work, it's not the essential theme of this book. After reading and thinking through some of the strategies, I became fascinated with the grading arbitrage game that is covered in great detail. Despite Travers' warnings about doing this online (and ebay specifically) I was able to parlay $600 into $1200 in about two months using ebay coin auctions. There is some risk involved and you absolutely must do your homework, but pretty much everything you need is discussed in this book. You can make your own price guide by using the resources on ebay; you will also need the self-discipline to not over-bid!

1 comments about Schroeder's Collectible Toys, Antique to Modern Price Guide - 2008: Identification & Values of over 20,000 Collectible Toys (Schroeder's Collectible Toys).

1. I have found this book to be very helpful in my study of toys. I am a novice and have learned what to look for in buying a modern or antique toy. This book has saved me from buying reproductions and how to guage a price for the real thing. I also just like looking thourgh it, takes me back to my childhood and revist Christmas past. Nice reference or just fun reading. Recommend.

5 comments about O'Brien's Collecting Toys: Identification and Value Guide (Collecting Toys Identification and Value Guide).

1. Great Resource for Toy Collectors. Got this as a gift for a family member who collects toys. He said it was very informative, especially for antique toys.



2. I would rate this comprehensive guide to collecting toys as a basic necessity for the beginning toy collector as well as the veteran toy collector. Not only is this new reference exciting, but the information is extremely helpful, reader friendly, accurate, and up-to-date with contributions by many leading authorities in the toy-collecting field. If you are seriously interested in toy collecting, then this fine book is a MUST for your toy-reference library!



3. Elizabeth Stephan's O'Brien's Collecting Toys, 10th Edition is a weighty price guide which could well be used as a price 'bible' for toy collectibles. Anticipate only a handful of color photos mid-book: the meat of the title lies in its black and white photos throughout and more particularly its over 50,000 items categorized for quick reference and provided with the latest values.



4. 10th edition, year 2001 very comprehensive collectible toys guide featuring more than 51,000 values for its 17,000 listings. There are more than 3,700 black and white pictures and a 16-page color section. A complete table of contents makes item location easy. Its items range from Action Jackson, Buck Rogers, Charlie's Angels and Evel Knievel, to Addams Family, Howdy Doody, Munsters and Pez and Matchbox, Renwal, Tootisetoy and wooden toys. Each major topic covers a nice introduction to the area. Very useful reference for toy collectors and enthusiasts.



5. O'Brien's Collecting Toys covers an awful lot of ground and does it well. Whether you are a collector or a dealer you MUST have this book to be on the same page everyone else is when evaluating the values of most antique and vintage toys. While the book does cover many of the popular toys and manufacturers, it does have many ommissions, at least in the area of tin windups. In the future I'd like to see more toys added, and other manufacturers included..most notably Guntherman, Marklin, Martin, Arnold. A more intuitive listing of the toys would also help as it can sometimes be difficult to find the toy you're looking for.

4 comments about Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750.

1. I rediscovered this book after college since I was probably too young to truly appreciate it the first time around. I use it now as the textbook for my Culture of Design seminar because it is one of the rare design history books that can ground design in its social context with real depth or clarity. (And boy, have I looked!)
   
   While it can seem long winded to some, the ideas contained within are so novel and well explained that it can make someone allergic to 18th and 19th Century Design (like myself) truly appreciate the radical innovations of that period. For example, the Industrial Revolution was not just due to the steam engine's invention but more specifically to division of labor such as implemented in Wedgewood's factory in the mid 18th century.
   
   The chapter on "Differentiation by Design" is a gem, showing how design reinforces class, age and gender roles. In the chapter on labor saving devices, women didn't really save any labor since cleanliness standards simply rose to meet product opportunities...
   
   It's true that the book's layout, infographics and quality of the images do not do it justice... Hopefully the next reprint will address that.



2. What is design? Is it what we make it to be, how we want it to be, or is it just designed and accepted by society? Adrian Forty writes the book in an unusual way by setting up each chapter as its own entity, yet the concepts in all the chapters somehow relate. The author enjoys jumping from topic to topic at high speed which makes the read interesting with the overwhelming examples there are in products- in one chapter it went from pocketknives to watches to childhood furniture to textiles to soap to architecture within a span of a couple pages. Ridiculous as it may be, it somehow kept my attention. Filled with pictures of antique and modern design, Forty proves that design has progressed though time according to the needs or perceived needs of society. It makes you see things more as designs than products, and inspires you to wonder why something was designed the way it was. This book was assigned to be read in one of my college classes, and I decided to keep it instead of selling it back after the semester ended.



3. This is more for the reader who wants to read an economic and cultural treatise on the development of design and how it has affected culture.
   
   If it wasn't so long-winded I would have actually enjoyed it a lot more. Forty has looked at some of the assumptions we have made about design and culture and realised that they are not quite as they seem. A classic example he uses is that the invention and high use of sewing machines coincided with the impossibly ruffled gowns and dresses of the 1860's - the assumption has always been that the sewing machine made this type of style possible. Forty points out that these dresses did indeed use up to 100yds of fabric, and the use of the sewing machine only made them possible by making them more affordable. Sweatshops paid machine sewers far less than they paid hand sewers - therefore more complex dresses made by machine could be made for cheaper cost. My only problem with Forty is that he takes nearly 2 pages to say this.
   
   I have some other problems with this work, I don't think it is well illustrated - all illustrations are small and in black and white - a bit hard to take in things that he calls 'richly glazed' and so on when you can't even see the colours. It also means he has catalogues and so on in here printed in impossibly small form so you can barely make out the designs.
   
   On another petty note, I was surprised to see the picture of a cauliflower tea pot - fully functional from Wedgewood on one page, and then several pages later a picture of the mould was shown - both from 1760. What suprised me was that there was no reference in the text or near either illustration alluding to the fact that these were both in here. I thought something like this would at least have a small footnote directing to the other page.
   
   I realise that with printing you have to make compromises but I didn't feel that these essentially editing and printing details did the book and its subject full justice. This really is a great book - divided into 11 chapters from the first industrial designers, to design in the home, labour-saving in the home and design and corporate identity. It just doesn't really quite make it.



4. Design, according to Adrian Forty, encompasses not just how things look, but how they are made and marketed as well. In a very readable and well-illustrated book, Forty shows how design reflects and changes culture. His fascinating historical accounts show how modern consumer society developed. Victorian pocket knives, for instance, mirrored and reinforced that era's strict social structure. In another example, Forty reaches back to the 1750s to show how Wedgewood china introduced revolutionary changes in industrial manufacturing, design, and marketing that made the industrial revolution possible. Objects of Desire should appear on the reading lists of every design department and business school

2 comments about A Guide Book of Lincoln Cents (The Official Red Book).

1. I picked up A Guide Book of Lincoln Cents by Q. David Bowers last weekend and thought I would post a review of what I thought of it.
   
   It starts off with a nice forward by Charles D. Daughtrey and moves into some very interesting sections. There is of course the history of the Lincoln Cent both wheat and memorial reverse. Then it moves into the minting process. After that it goes into the proofs and how they were made from 1909 to date.
   
   The proof section I found very informative and interesting, after that it goes into grading Lincoln Cents, Mr. Bowers is very honest when it comes to third party grading services and provides some background on when they started.
   
   It then moves into how to be a smart buyer, ways to collect, then finally analysis and market guide to Lincoln Cents. For each year he describes how the dies were that year, what was going on in the world of numismatics, some nice notes, striking and sharpness population reports for MS wheat coins and PF for memorials. There is also a price guide that is pretty close.
   
   What I found interesting was how he took quotes, articles, and other things of interest from some other very popular Lincoln experts. He tried to offer both sides of the fence views and some issues. Take the 22 no "D", there is an quote from Chuck that explains how it is nothing more than a worn out die.
   
   The book has nice color pictures for each year (I think they need to be a little larger)
   
   Things I would change about the book would be- Larger pictures for the grading section, population reports for key dates that go before MS-65 and population reports for MS memorial cents and PF wheat cents.
   
   All in all I would give this book a 9 on a scale of 1-10 and would recommend it to any Lincoln collector.



2. Coin collectors who are gathering Lincoln cents have lots to work with and understand: it's the country's longest-running coin series. This official guide covers its history, rarity, values, grading and many varieties as the coin nears its 100th anniversary and most importantly, discusses some of the greatest challenges to coin collecting. Tips on buying, selling, and grading a Lincoln cents collection makes for a fine market analysis for all dates and mintmarks, and even includes an appendix on error coins. Any library strong in coin collecting at any level must have this reference.