Renniks cattle dog

[Bigfellani5]

Renniks catalogue planned for about November this year

[runway]

26th Edition available Oct/Nov
Revised and Edited by Michael T Pitt
Soft Cover RACBV26 $37.50
Hard Cover RACBVHC26 $47.50

[runway]

Nice publication,from my brief read today there's still mistakes however the editor encourages feedback

[frenc11]

just got my copy of renniks today and i must say it is impressive

[Goldseeker]

I was tempted the other day to purchase the latest Rennicks, had a quick flick through it and got lost on the layout.

Decided not to buy and will wait patiently for Greg's to come out.

They say that it hard for an oldie to change, well I am one of those oldies.

[trout]

They say that it hard for an oldie to change, well I am one of those oldies.

I think that some of us oldies tend to embrace change most of the time.
I have always preferred Maccas to rennics though :angel:

[humpybong]

Does anyone know who has the best price for the book and postage.

Ebay has one for A$25 plus A$13.80 postage.

[Bigfellani5]

I will do $35 posted anywhere in Australia. Won't leave till after 9 Jan as I am on holidays.

Does anyone know who has the best price for the book and postage.

Ebay has one for A$25 plus A$13.80 postage.

[frenc11]

why is there no love for renniks here , it has been going for over 50 years and has continued on to survive after all other publications have come and gone ??

[Greg McDonald]

Hi there frenc11

I think you might be reading a bit too much into the comments made about the Renniks catalogue in this thread.  As they say "a single swallow doesn't make a summer".  I know that Renniks has been around for 50 years... I was there! Along with Tom Hanley's books,  the Renniks catalogue was instrumental in me developing an interest in numismatics since I was about eight.  
It was a great thrill for me to be able to meet both gentlemen years later and let Dion Skinner and Tom know how their respective tomes were life changing for me.  I was paid a similar compliment some years ago when well-know dealer,  Andrew Crellan said his interest in numismatics was inspired after reading my 1983 Rigby's Australian Coin and Banknote Guide.
   Naturally, I am grateful to get positive feedback about our book, and like Renniks, we both strive to continually improve each edition.
   In the final analysis,  I think it is fair to say that both books have their strengths and weakness,' or to put it another way, enough variety and original material to put the latest edition of each on the library shelf.
   Considering what most collectors spend on their hobby each year,  I would have thought for less than $80, you have access to over 900 pages of up to date information each year. That sounds like a pretty good investment in-its-self.
   Fear not, frenc11, I am sure Renniks will be around for many years.

Cheers
Greg

[Fulvio]

Considering what most collectors spend on their hobby each year,  I would have thought for less than $80, you have access to over 900 pages of up to date information each year. That sounds like a pretty good investment in-its-self.

Oh dear. Sorry Greg, but I just can't let this one slide.

While I do have both, and many issues of yours, which I prefer, I can't really agree with the 'up to date' tag for any annual publication. Even my own PDF which is updated semi-regularly isn't what I'd call 'current'. And IT only deals with circulating decimals!

The way I see it, there are two distinctly different works, which have been forcibly mashed together.

One is the 'spec sheet', you might say. The details of what was produced and when, with all sorts of info such as weights, mintages, varieties, etc.

The other is the price guide.

The specs, once determined, are static. Barring some new revelation, they don't change often, or at all. And when they do, its through research carried out by members of the community, such as right here. THIS is where the up-to-date stuff is, not in a dead tree. All that's needed is to add new releases, and update any new information that's come to light. So if you're collecting pre-decimals say, any edition will suffice.

The price guide is where ALL the grief comes from. We all know the tribulations you've gone through, and the massive revaluation that resulted. But honestly, catalogue 'value' isn't really worth the paper its printed on. Not when the market is now determined by eBay, and can vary by an order of magnitude in very short order. If you actually NEED a price, you need it to be accurate, and you're not going to get that out of any book. Otherwise, a 'near-enough' relative guide is plenty, and any edition will give you that for stuff released to that point.

So no, I don't agree that an $80 a year 'tax' is a good investment at all. Yes, these are good reference works, and we all use them somewhat regularly. But there's no need to add every new issue to the collection, unless maybe if you're a book collector. Think of it like buying a new Melways every year when you have Google maps and a GPS navigator in your car. :angel:

What there IS a need for, which nobody is addressing, is an extensible definitive work. I'm a life member of the National Model Railroad Association, and the thing that led me to join all those years ago was the data sheets they produced. This was (is) a 3-ring binder containing Standards, Recommended Practices and General Information on all aspects of the hobby, which would be published and updated as required through an insert in the monthly magazine, and added to the binder which every new member got to keep it current. Nowadays of course, its all available online, but you can still print the sheets if you wish.

I would like to see a similar reference work, whether on paper or digital, with a separate price guide that was updatable based on near-real-time data. Said data could be collected manually or automatically, but would need to be realistic, not pie-in-the-sky. Something like Beckett's price guides for cards. But the heart would be the coin information, not the pricing.

Done right, THIS is something I could justify an annual subscription to. But the current offerings? Maybe once or twice a decade I'm afraid.

[Greg McDonald]

Hi Fulvio,

You made a lot of valid points in your post and I don't disagree with much of what you said. Until we find a way of impregnating a liquid crystal into a sheet of paper this is an argument that will never end or be sold.  Obviously, a catalogue that comes out yearly, and generally every two years in the case of Renniks, is never going to have the 'right price' [whatever that is].
You are obviously a car fan [great image on the other post, by the way] and so I am sure if you picked a particular new car of any breed and priced it by trolling the length of Parramatta Road - or similar - you'd come up with dozens of quotes  for exactly the same car with the same options.  At best any pricing catalogue related to cars, antiques, bottles or coins can only give the reader an estimate - a guide.  That's why the word 'guide' is part of the title of my books.   I try to give a detailed explanation of how I derive my prices on page eight of my book.  It's been there for years now and throughout the book, I slip in captions saying, "Please read our comments on page 8 before looking at prices."
In the text on that page, you will see I am not a great fan of eBay.  This is not to say that bargains cannot be had or most of the genuine items are not offered by knowledgeable collectors or even dealers using the internet to subsidise their bricks and mortar shops.  And that's the rub - dealers who operate shops and have to deal with all the overheads - including paying their rightful taxes and GST cannot compete with a collector who gets lucky at a garage sale or similar.
And while I emphasise again, that most eBay offers are properly described and fairly priced, there are some real shockers out there.  At the moment a guy is offering a bunch of tattered pre-decimal banknotes worth about $300 tops for $8,000!!!  The 'jewel' of this offering is a 'super' rare QE2 Ten Bob which he describes as being 'uniface' and being printed on ultra thin paper. Most collectors will recognise this as a banknote that has been split in two with a razor blade.  Obviously a very time-consuming process but at the end of the day the man with the steady hands ends up with two notes. Pick a venue where money changes very quickly such as a race track and you hand over the two notes - one facing up, the other facing down.  Result.  A quid's worth of odds on the gee-gees' I bought and sold two or three of these in my time -usually for higher denominations and while they have curiosity value there is no way something like this is worth the balance of $8000 when you deduct the rest of the notes that look like they've been dug up with the potatoes.
At best, a coin "guide" can give you an approximation or a clue that something might be worth further investigation.  If you are at the kitchen table sorting through granny's jam jar of pennies, a coin guide will tell that most dates in average condition are worth about $1 [and that's only if you are buying it - see page 8 again].  However, if you were to chance across a 1930 penny that says $10,000 rather than $1 you're not going to throw that back into the jar.  If you sell it to a dealer, in auction --- or on eBay.  You might get $7,000 for it or $15,000 - but that's not the point. The catalogue simply helped sort the wheat from the chaff.  That's not to say there are other means of finding out this sort of information, but a book is still an inexpensive source of a lot of information.
I think guides might also serve another purpose - especially where a new collector is concerned.  I have always tried to add 'footnotes'  to many issues to either explain subtle differences from similar looking coins or just to include some historical notes of interest.
You probably don't see a lot of Holey Dollars, Adelaide Ingots or Hay Internment notes on eBay, and if you did, the buyer would only be interested in providing enough info to entice you to buy - the seller is not interested in giving you a history lesson.
I think the only issue I really have with the comments, concerns the data sheet you get with your model railway set.  I think we would both agree that producing 12,000 to 15,000 ring binders as a starting point has it's drawbacks.  However, for the sake of argument, let's say either Renniks or I did so and all the information in our current book was included.  If I am reading you right, you're saying that every so often we produce update sheets to cover new issues. The logistics of having collectors go to a coin or book shop to buy ten or twenty loose pages at a time would be cost prohibitive [or even more tax, to quote you]. The other issue is what to do with the original pages that came with the ring binder? After two or three years these would be useless.  Prices would be even more meaningless and recently released mintage figures would appear as 'n/a' in the pages printed a few years ago.   If you have to reprint these pages to slot them in or replace out of date pages, the headache just gets worse.
I fully understand where you are coming from and it's obvious that two world's are colliding.  When I did my first book back in 1983, we not only didn't have the internet, apps or Google - we didn't have computers.  Well, that's not strictly true, computers were just starting to emerge but only God and drug dealers could afford them.
I bought my first computer in 1987, a Mac SE11 that had a 'mammoth' 4mgs of ram. I bought a laser printer [that took two people to lift] and the then latest version of PageMaker.  Total price $23,000 .... I kid you not.  Just to give you some idea of what $23k was back in the day.  A year later I bought a brand new Ford Fairlane for a bit less.
I can see I am again going to have to grasp the nettle and look at producing my book in some form of electronic form.  I am meeting up with a company in Sydney as soon as I get the 23rd away to the printer so watch this space.
Good post Fulvio, it will be interesting to see if any of the other members can add to the discussion.

Cheers

Greg

[JeffH]

Years ago car companies produced printed and bound workshop manuals. Then they found they had to issue service bulletins (updates) for all sorts of reasons that made some of the information in the original manuals obsolete.
So then they went to ring binders and updates and revisions could be easily added (if the registered owner of the manual could be bothered). And, with the increasing complexity of modern vehicles that tended to end up as multiple volumes as the size of the manuals increased exponentially to keep up with the technology in the vehicles.
Now they tend to issue them in CD/DVD format and cost to issue a complete, revised version is negligible once the revisions have been made.

Of course they need to have a register of owners of manuals and a subscription system to ensure manuals are kept up to date. That means they usually restrict purchase to authorised service people. Long gone are the days when anyone could buy factory manuals at the spare parts counter or even some of the larger bookshops.
[Of course hacked copies are readily available from eBay and such.]

Not an entirely accurate analogy to what might happen with coin guides but has features in common.

I have a Printed Krause World coins 2001 to date (1.74kg, 912 pages, approximately US letter size) and also same on disk (which is searchable). Disk version is loaded on my computer and quick and easy to find some specific information. The printed version is, in my opinion, far superior for browsing just for interest.
So which is better? No simple answer to that.
I don't really use either for checking values but, as Greg said, I do look at mintages and relative values to get an idea of which years/varieties might be the more desirable/hard to get ones.

[frenc11]

i buy both rennicks and macdonalds guides every year and have every single edition of both , as i find them both essential to my collecting needs

[robbiegal]

i like the layout and extra detail in Maccas
i like the attention to errors and varieties dies in the pre-decimals in rennicks

i like the size of the maccas too
i usually have both books  but mostly only ever take Maccas to coin shows etc

i have always found the rennicks is a little closer to actual retail but maccas is the mainstay for most selling values with dealers

just as i used to use the little red book for car values - a reference point based on relevant informative about the item

i like seeing the 2 catalouges out there - keep them both going I say!