ok, let me see if i can answer everyone's questions.
first off, i'm not kidding myself into thinking this will be a piece of cake. the collating task is thankfully not one i have to worry about as the printing plates are all prepared digitally from the master pdf's. the rest, unfortunately, will be.
since the questions revolve mostly around
probus, an emperor i haven't done yet, i can say the following:
- the format will be the same as that of
carus and all the others in the book.
consistency in format is a bookwide rule i won't break except perhaps in a couple of "experimental" cases. for one, under
philip i caved in and distinguished a variety between busts seen from front and those from rear. personally, i think it's trivial but i'm game to see what
comes of it.
any time i break one of these
consistency rules i pile on an excessive amount of
work and make the book a
bit less cohesive for the benefit of a few ultra-specialists. so far, it's not worth it as an investment of time.
- where i will break it down more than ric is to give each
mintmark arrangement a separate entry. two identical
mintmarks with different
officinae will have two ensuing entries. you don't need to tell me this will be a daunting task, i already know. again, you can probably get a feel for what i have done with
carus. with the
carus rough draft and the
probus section of
eric I you can get a pretty
good idea of where i will be going with this.
- i wouldn't be so crude as to call any one piece "unlisted". the workaround however is elegant enough: if i can't find a listing in one of my references i put in the reference i do know. my sort order is preferentially listed first by a printed reference, then by an online one if i have access to the image (usually a
tantalus id no.) and lastly by a "
collection of so-and-so" if i don't have the image. if i haven't actually SEEN the coin in hand or from a decent pic i'm not likely to include it unless it
comes from a printed reference (in which case it would be provisionally listed as an "unconfirmed")
- not getting too fancy with decorations of accessories. this is where i draw the line. and again, i realize this is an arbitrary line that isn't necessarily right or wrong and may even change for
eric iii. for a design element to trigger a discrete variety in
eric ii it has to be substantial. to use the provided example,
alfoldi clearly goes overboard by breaking down the positioning of the barbarian in distress (and a similar parallel can be found in
ric viii with
fel temp varieties, also taking pains to point out the various ways the horseman falls).
- i'm also not taking account of
legend breaks, or puncutating dots within breaks, as i feel that is also rather trivial. however, i'm much more sensitive to
mintmarks and will give varieties here a lot more attention.
- a bigger problem for me will be in determining whether two identical coins in terms of design were minted in different cities. there's a lot of controversy surrounding origin mints and i'm kind of caught in the crossfire. since i don't have anywhere near the scholastic
genius of a gobl or
pink or
estiot when they disagree i'm left with an awkward position. the format presently allows for an entry such as Bx, Ox, Rx, Tx, My where x's are the representative line item making up the coin from a primary list of availables and the y's are the
mint cities. in this way i can account for any given entry with the same design and
mintmark to be listed in as many
mint cities as there are listed. this confuses the user as it forces him or her to
catalog a coin based on
style cues alone which is beyond the scope of the book and is, as we have noted, controversial in the first place. any suggestions?
probus is an extreme example both because ric is so notoriously weak in this
area and also because of the sheer corpus of coins. i will probably use gobl and
estiot as my primary references for the 270-280 decade and since i can't afford the books at the moment i'm putting these guys on the back burner. all in all i expect both the
probus and
aurelian sections to number in the thousands when all is said and done.
ras
