Renniks Australian Coin & Banknote Values 31st Ed. Softcover

A price guide is half reference book and half mirror: it tells you what things are worth, and rather more about what people wanted at the time.

This is the 31st edition of Renniks Australian Coin & Banknote Values, the softcover, edited by Michael T Pitt — the standard Australian guide, with over 3,850 images and thousands of valuations covering coins and notes from 1800 to 2022. Copper, silver, gold and nickel; pre-decimal and decimal; tokens, war issues, privately printed notes and the modern mint releases. If it circulated in Australia, it is likely catalogued and priced in here.

It is the dated-ness that Jonah secretly values most. He keeps every old edition he has ever owned, a shelf of them, their prices marching gently upward year by year, and he reads them the way other people read diaries. An old catalogue tells you what a coin cost the year you couldn't afford it, and what a fashion looked like before it passed. He has settled more than one good-natured argument across a desk simply by reaching for the right year and letting the page do the talking. A current edition answers today's question; the old ones remember.

Buy it to look things up, and keep it long enough to watch the market change its mind.

A reference book earns its place not when it is new, but when you still have it ten years on.