Folio of your collection?

[Optimo Principi]

Hi all,

We all like to present and document our collections effectively; both for our own enjoyment and also to hopefully make it more accessible to others.

I'm considering compiling a folio of my collection - mostly for presentational value; a way for myself and others to enjoy my coins when they're not at hand. Each coin would have its own full-colour oversize photo, description with references, perhaps an explanation of its background aimed at the layman (Gods/Goddesses, historical context etc), date of acquisition and so on. I would want it to aesthetically pleasing rather than cluttered with academic information.

Now I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted here - no doubt many of you, especially those of you that do not have daily access to your collections, have something similiar to this already, be it on paper or digital.

I would be very grateful if you could share your examples of such compendiums? I'm eager to see other people's presentational ideas. I'm sure there are advanced document/publishing suites being used but I've only got the basic Microsoft Office programs at the moment.

Attached is a very rough sample page I've just thrown together as a first pass at the idea...

[Andrew McCabe]

Hi all,

We all like to present and document our collections effectively; both for our own enjoyment and also to hopefully make it more accessible to others.

I'm considering compiling a folio of my collection - mostly for presentational value; a way for myself and others to enjoy my coins when they're not at hand. Each coin would have its own full-colour oversize photo, description with references, perhaps an explanation of its background aimed at the layman (Gods/Goddesses, historical context etc), date of acquisition and so on. I would want it to aesthetically pleasing rather than cluttered with academic information.

Now I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted here - no doubt many of you, especially those of you that do not have daily access to your collections, have something similiar to this already, be it on paper or digital.

I would be very grateful if you could share your examples of such compendiums? I'm eager to see other people's presentational ideas. I'm sure there are advanced document/publishing suites being used but I've only got the basic Microsoft Office programs at the moment.

Attached is a very rough sample page I've just thrown together as a first pass at the idea...

I've done this, not once but several times, and below are some sample pages, with many more in the link here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/sets/72157622938254759/detail/

There is a clever trick to doing this, and it's to avoid re-entering any information you've ever created before. Take the first pic below for example. It looks like two pages of densely written text with photos of my coins. Hours and hours and hours? No not at all. It is simply a printout from my web-gallery of this actual webpage: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/sets/72157615124858197/detail/?page=3
and the detailed texts are to a great extent copies-and-pastes from non-copyright sources.

The third picture below combines holiday snaps, with some of my coins, and information on the ancient world culled from wikipedia.

etc.

The results look really marvellous, and the hardback binding is a must. But I do urge you - don't write a new book if the information already exists. It is more important to use high quality paper and glossy colour printing than to write your own version of the battle of Actium when 1000 versions are already available on the web.

And of course, great quality colour photographs of your coins is an essential starting point!

In terms of "software" I used absolutely nothing. I just printed the pages, to PDF, direct from the internet, or in some cases made up pages using Microsoft Word - even in those cases I didn't use any fancy layout, just text and pictures within table-boxes. The nicer layout features you see below are all internet generated, using "other peoples" layout schemes. The lazy way to publication!

[Optimo Principi]

Andrew, your compendia look outstanding. You have clearly invested a huge amount of time and effort into compiling them, indeed they look like a professionally published book series - thank you for sharing. Luckily for me at this stage, I don't think my collection would stretch to so many volumes!

Your suggestion of using holiday snaps to add to the background of the coin seems blatantly obvious now, what a great idea. How could I have a coin of Trajan's column without a pic of the real thing!

I would love to have it bound eventually but that would take away the ability to add/take away coins so I may have a more temporary binding.

[Andrew McCabe]

Andrew, your compenia look outstanding. You have clearly invested a huge amount of time and effort into compiling them, indeed they look like a professionally published book series - thank you for sharing. Luckily for me at this stage, I don't think my collection would stretch to so many volumes!

Your suggestion of using holiday snaps to add to the background of the coin seems blatantly obvious now, what a great idea. How could I have a coin of Trajan's column without a pic of the real thing!

I would love to have it bound eventually but that would take away the ability to add/take away coins so I may have a more temporary binding.

Not at all. Almost no time at all. I invested a lot of time into photographing coins, monuments, compiling descriptions, loading stuff on the internet etc. The effort in producing the folio was hardly anything in comparison.

Specifically, the 450 page book I produced end 2009 took evenings and weekends of 3-4 weeks. Perhaps 100 hours. The additional 100 page book I made late last year took a few evenings and 1 weekend, maybe 30 hours.

You can get it all bound now and mark it "2011" on the binding. And then in a year, do it again!!! And again in 2013!!! The red hardback binding cost me 25 euro. The glossy paper and colour printing (from pdf) was much more expensive. Don't wait, do it now!

[Jay GT4]

Andrew that is amazing!  I'm inspired to do my own modest collection now.  So simple, why didn't  I think of that?!

Thank you!

[Andrew McCabe]

Andrew that is amazing!  I'm inspired to do my own modest collection now.  So simple, why didn't  I think of that?!

Thank you!

The first trick is to be amazingly lazy and efficient using information you already have available - print to PDF direct from web-pages and your coin galleries, print to PDF from your coin records and spreadsheet lists, from your photo sites etc., capture screen-prints of stuff you like and print those to PDF, stick the PDFs together, and bring them to a print shop.

The second trick is to be amazingly generous with paper. Print on colour to high quality 90 or 120 gram/m2 paper and pay to get the result bound properly. You get stunning and professional results and no-one will notice that your pages are cluttered with their origin as one-time webpages. It just looks super-professional.

Two useful utilities for creating PDFs, both free and allowing you to do much of what expensive Adobe Acrobat does for nothing: "PDF Split and Merge" and "CutePDF writer"

www.pdfsam.org/

www.cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/writer.asp

A third useful utility was one that came free with my colour printer and allows me to select areas of web-pages to print, and indeed to save and merge a number of sections on different webpages into a single document. That allowed me to "Crop" my coin galleries to show only the information I wanted without having all the commercial cr*p surrounding it. If you don't have such a utility, PrtScr and cropping will do as well, although not as neat.

Footnote on laziness: my "books" incorporate several Forum discussion threads which I authored. I didn't copy and paste them into a new format, I just printed direct to PDF from the web browser to capture the text and the picture below. You've no idea how lazy I can get.

[Jay GT4]

Just came across this site from a friend who did his own book about his vacation

www.blurb.com

It does everything for you with layouts and text and then even prints the book for you.  This would lend itself very nicely for coins!

[Andrew McCabe]

Just came across this site from a friend who did his own book about his vacation

www.blurb.com

It does everything for you with layouts and text and then even prints the book for you.  This would lend itself very nicely for coins!

I've experimented with blurb and it does not work well for coins. It has pre-defined layouts which don't work very well and it automatically crops photos in ways you do not like - as coin photos tend to be long and narrow one can lose the ends of the photos. There isn't any automated way to bring in text associated with a picture - for example it doesn't import the coin title or picture information in a way you can use as text. In other words it is really designed for family vacation albums and not for anything more impressive.

Lulu is a different matter:
http://www.lulu.com

Much more flexible, but conversely much less automated and also not focussed specially on pictures. But if you can make a pdf, Lulu will convert it into an attractive hardback glossy full-colour book with a pictorial front cover. If you want that. It'll even offer your book for sale online.

[Jay GT4]

Thanks Andrew, I just quickly looked at it today and was going to play around with it tonight.  My friends vacation book looks fantastic and I thought it would work...