Book review: A Guide Book of Civil War Tokens by Q. David Bowers (Digital edition)

Although technically exonumia, both Hard Times and Civil War tokens circulated as money during times when official coinage was scarce. This makes them more interesting to collectors than they might have been otherwise.

Because all of these were completely unofficial, there is a wide variety of designs and also a great number of mixed obverse and reverse dies. For example, there are two dozen or more pages of tokens that look very much like this.

All of that means that it is certainly possible to discover an unknown type that never reached wide circulation. Even without that, these are fascinating and generally inexpensive to collect.

This book catalogs many tokens of this period. The color images are good quality and will expand to full page when you "pinch out", allowing you to fully examine details. This book is NOT just pictures of tokens with rarity estimates and values - there is a large amount of history and explanatory text also.

The only complaint I can make at all is that not all die pairings are shown, but of course if they were, the book would be even larger than it is.

This is much more than a "coin book". I'd recommend to anyone with an interest in history and of course it is particularly relevant to the Civil War period.


Because of the ability to zoom photos, I would suggest the digital Kindle version. Note that you do not have to own a Kindle; Amazon provides free Kindle readers for Windows, Mac, Ipads, Android and more.

Buy this book at Amazon and help me support this site!

Note:  All my coins are in a safe deposit box.  I keep nothing in my home. 

Contests and giveaways: http://coins.aplawrence.com/2014/05/contests-and-giveaways.html