Condition: Good. Packed in a BOX with cardboard backing and padding. (See Photos!) Same or next day shipping (weekdays and Saturdays)! Ships from California. Pages: not written on, clean, bright, odor free. Dust Jacket: clean, bright, heavy rubbing to edges and corner tips, multiple tears to edges. ABOUT THIS: A history of coins and coinage; the relationship of coinage to money and the light which the study of coins can throw upon some of the problems of economic history, these are a few of the subjects which are examined in this richly illustrated book. The author's professional concern with contemporary financial affairs colours his approach to these themes, to the successive devaluations and monetary crises in the later Roman Empire, Byzantium and medieval Europe, to the inflation in the sixteenth century which followed the great discoveries of gold and silver in America, and to the emergence in turn of the great economic powers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book begins with a brief description of the Roman system and its collapse. It covers the coinage of western Europe and Byzantium during the middle ages, touching also on that of Islam. Always relating the subject to its social and economic background, the author deals in some detail with the sixteenth century, the age of some of the most attractive coins ever struck; describes the designs on coins of particular interest or beauty; explains the techniques of minting and surveys the original sources of bullion and the history of the mints themselves. He discusses the diminishing importance of coinage from the seventeenth century onwards, continues with the emergence of colonial coins, the currency reforms which followed the American and French Revolutions, and comes to an end with an appraisal of coinage adapted to modern industrial society. Many of the coins illustrated have been especially photographed and some of them have never been published before. The thirty-two colour plates and some three hundred bla