I have no idea where I picked this up, the Beginners Coin Collecting Check List:
But it is a flat-spined, although thin, mass market paperback-sized book, and the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge has a category called Money, so I thought I would pick it up.
What did I expect? Some text interspersed with lists of coins, I suppose. However, like the moose outside the park told me, it is a checklist of coins.
Tables of coins with columns of coin grades so you can check off what you have.
Oh, gentle reader. Even I, the most capricious and arbitrary of book counters, cannot call that a book that I have read either for annual accounting purposes or for the Winter Reading Challenge.
But I will add it to my book database and put on the read shelves anyway. Because as we get further into the 21st century, I feel more like I’m LARPing a monastery in the previous dark ages, storing up printed knowledge until someone is ready to read it again, although ultimately given my children are now of this generation, likely my collection will be dispersed at an estate sale, donated to a book sale, and/or ground into recyclable cat litter in a couple of decades (I hope! The couple of decades part, not the cat litter part).
And, you know what? This little booklet would be pretty handy if I were a coin collector, historic foreign coins notwithstanding–and, note: 1) I have not actually added to my collection since then, although I did return to the coin show solo one year with the thoughts I might and 2) the son who was briefly into coin collecting is no longer, since he was more into coin speculating by buying boxes of coins at the bank and going through them to see if any collectibles were in the box, so he wouldn’t want this book.
It would be nice if I had something like this for books or records come book sale time, where I could check to see if I had something that looked interesting already. But that would require completely cataloging records and adding the unread books to my books database. It would also include purchasing a subscription to a hosted database of some sort or rolling my own (and paying hosting fees for it, which might be less or more than a subscription to a hosted app). Instead, I will just spend the, what, twenty dollars a year (maybe) in purchasing duplicates and then donating them or giving them away.
Now, onto the other coin collecting book I have selected for Money instead of a book about finances. I didn’t spot anything that was purely money management in my stacks–just books about being a freelancer at various things and investing in flipping houses (of which I have a plethora from the turn of the century, when I was considering it–ah, the wealth I sacrificed by not being arsed).
