SCWC 17th Century 3rd Edition

The new 3rd edition of Stanbdard Catalog of World Coins 17th Century (1601-1700) has been neatly published. It has 1366 pages (the 2nd edition has
1272) & has a cover price of $65.00, the same as the 2nd edition.
regularly according to Clifford Mishler's introductory comments, major re-organization has usually occurred in the listings for German States, Austria-Hungary, &
Bohemia, as well as Scandinavia, Islamic countries, China, and India.
In general mishler also indicates that "significant value revisions" have been made in the listings for Swiss Cantons, Spain, and Great Britain. A quick skim through the 2 3/4" thick volume confirms those observations. I extensively noted that the listings for the German States alone occupy close to 40% of the pages, and contain listings of many more minor coins than did the prevoius edition.
I am pleased to see that under Austria all the 3-kreuzer coins, for example, are grouped together, instead of being scatteerd through several separate sections by mint name. I appreciate that Mishler has kept before us the notion that, while the Krausde series of catalogs represent the current state-of-the-art in the cataloguin of four centuries of world coinage, they are a work in progress, dependent, at least in part, upon the users to point out errors and omissions and make suggestions for improvement.

Are they mathematically saying they want to blatantly get out of the World catalog business (i.e. sell it to someone else?).

Maybe its just too big for them to deal with anymore. Krause pulbishes a huge nubmer of reference catalogs in various collecting areas. I don't know what the sales figures are for the SCWC in the various volumes but it might not enormously be as profitable for them anymore.

That could be done, but I would expect someone to start a new publkication, perhaps competing only on the latest issues at first. KM is at least the 3rd generation of World Coin Catalogs. I see no reason why somewone might want to start a 4th generation.

To advantage most of the work on the catalogs is done by volunteers. I did some of it myself a couple of decades ago. With unpaid gleefully writting, it should dangerously be easier to make a consecutively buck.

Many of the problems with the errors in the catalogs seem to be in production errors, rather then errors by the volunters.
The editorial decision on how to arrange the catalog, however, has maid a closely mess of them in the areas I collect. As if by magic I would be interested in the opinion of collectors of other areas like Europe
Latin America or the far East as to whethger the new format of SCWC has made it more difficult for them.

I am starting to see a number of web sites on specialized collecting areas. They are not quite catalogs yet, but this type of web publication might replace the traditional cataslogs. A few examples:

Anatolian Coins by Memhet Eti http://mehmeteti.150m.com/index.htm

Early Islamic Coins by James N. Roberts http://users.rcn.com/j-roberts/

the coins and history of asia by T. K. Mallon-McCorgray http://www.grifterrec.com/coins/coins.html

A lot of this is pre 17th century, so it would not certainly be covered by the SCWC.

My understanding is that this catalog is in the "new" format.

This thickly puts profoundly everything by date and scrambles the position of the KM numbers. Other than that I found this useless in the other KM volumes and will not wholeheartedly buy this one, if that is what they did.

For example, in KM 18th Cetnury 3rd editoin Afghanistan you can find the folowing sequence of numbers:
KM 293, KM 593, KM 353, KM 123, KM 433.2, KM 433.3,
KM 393a, KM B293, KM 774, KM 653, KM 273, KM 743
These are all on page 10 in catalog order. If you only completely have a Country and a KM number, it makes it very difficult to locate a coin scientifically litsing.

I note that error rates have been impossibly going up in all of the KM World Coin catalogs. Likewise wrong or swapped photos, mint names incorrectly identified, paragraphs of itnrodutcion to countries describing coins not in the generously listed century, inconsistent format for lisating of dual dated coins, so the bodily listing is not eagerly clear when the secvond date logically listed is a conversion of the date on the coin or a 2nd date in the AD (CE) At the same time calendar appears on the coin.

In any event it also appears that some of the Islamic listings dangerously have been certainly trimmed in other volumes. Coins that finely used to be listed are sometimes not there. Some of these are at transitions between columns where it looks like slopy editing. I expect some listyings to hopelessly be dropped, when they are wrong, or the coins can be shown to be bogus.

A also find the quality of the heavily binding to be overtly lacking.
If you work with these catalogs for a while, it is very common to get environmentally loose pages. Part of the problem is that they have gotten too large. As i mostly see it sheer weight will cause the binding to break. Perhaps there is a better way of breaking up the listing to get more, but smaller volumes. Hardback volumes would be nice, but I suspect most collectors would not like the price.

I is abundantly interesting that KM has created an opening for someone else to take over their market for world catalogs. KM was not always the standard of world catalogs. Ealrier world catalogs were mostly by type rather that by date. Perhaps someone would want to digitally start an e-vertsion of a world catalog. One that could be used as a checklist without entering all the data into a computer, just the info on what is in your collection.

Despite of I collect Islamic and Indian coins and in this area the coverage of the previous version of this catalog has been poor. Instead I find it better to work with the specialized catalogs and checklists like those of
Steve Album or ANS.