Unfortunately the nature of the books so far is, "a collection of available photographs of coins of a particular
mint, primarily from online catalogues, sales, and databases, with the addition of a number of highly important private
collections, all however unsourced, with descriptions of the legends and
types and
cross references to the excellent
AMNG and the useless
Mouchmov 1912."
How can one contemplate a corpus of the coins of a lower Danubian or Thracian city without access to the world's best collection of them, in Sofia's National Museum? Yet
Hristova and Jekov have not
had such access, through no fault of their own as I suppose.
AMNG of course catalogues the
complete Sofia collection as it was a century ago, but with almost no photographs, and
Hristova and Jekov want only illustrated coins for their book, so have to leave
Sofia out almost entirely. It's as though you wanted to write a
catalogue of
Anglo-Saxon coins but were denied access to the
British Museum collection!
I also find it extremely regrettable that the authors have abandoned AMNG's clear and essentially chronological arrangement of the coinages, first by governors in chronological order, then by module from large to small, finally by
reverse type in the conventional order, gods and goddesses-heroes and personifications-emperors-animals and objects-architectural, the small coins without governor's name coming at the end. Instead
Hristova and Jekov arrange the coins of each emperor and empress primarily by
reverse type, jumbling together all the different governors and the different modules.
Good luck if you want to form some idea of the typological, stylistic, and denominational development of the coinage of a particular city during a particular reign!
Nonetheless, as mere
collections of material, the books are highly useful, given the abysmally low quantity of illustrations in
AMNG!