Although Andrew Burnett frequently looks forward to further research on the people and topics here covered, it is hard to think that anyone will ever seek to cover again all the ground here covered with such massive accumulated learning: the Bibliography shows that B.'s interest in the subject goes back some thirty years at least. The book deals with collectors, dealers (the two categories of course often overlapped), local antiquarians, scholars making use of numismatic evidence, as well as more marginal figures, such as schoolteachers who happened to be the first witnesses of coin finds. It is particularly pleasurable to be introduced to the corona of lesser women and men, who provide a context for such great men as Cotton, Camden, Thomas Smith, Selden; and to see set beside the collectors with many thousands of coins in their collections humbler collectors with only a few hundred pieces: the latter might sometimes include specimens of great rarity and/or importance.

The chapters of the first two volumes proceed in a roughly chronological order, with themes such as Greek coinage, mostly of Italy, or the coinage of the Greek East under Roman rule, this described first by B. himself as Roman Provincial coinage, or Jewish coinage, or oriental coinages, inserted at appropriate points. The third volume offers a chronological Register of collectors, followed by a rich series of Appendices, containing transcriptions of letters and other documents, and listings of the contents of coin collections, concluded by an exhaustive set of Indices.

Unsurprisingly, much of the interest of the people studied was in English (or Scottish or Irish) coinage, but it would be a mistake if readers of this journal skipped those sections that deal with these aspects: one cannot make sense of what Camden had to say about Roman coins without understanding the pattern of his work as a whole. I have one suggestion: Erasmus appears as a correspondent of some of the people studied, with the qualification that he was not a collector; but I have a recollection, that may be incorrect, that the collection of the Stadtmuseum in Basle contains some rather worn Republican denarii.

There are occasional infelicities: thus at I, 88–9, B. laments that there seems to be no record of Antonio Agustín and Jean Matal, the former at least the author of a major numismatic work, in England in 1555, having numismatic conversations with English scholars; but their preoccupation was surely rather with the return of England to Roman Catholicism. We are later referred (I, 511) to a coin of the rare Aemilian; but it is of course the coin that is rare, not the Emperor. And at II, 576–7, B. first prospects the idea that Charles Laxton is to be identified with Thomas Laxton, but then seems to think the two men were brothers.

The book is marred by rather frequent misprints, also words omitted or repeated, that will not on the whole mislead; but since many of the quotations are from source material that uses what would not now be regarded as standard English, it is unfortunate: I give one example of a misprint in B.'s own prose, at II, 900, ‘a wide range of second and primary sources’; but the book as a whole is a magnificent achievement, controlling an enormous mass of disparate source material to tell a coherent story of intermittent, but cumulative intellectual effort, concluding appropriately with the early years of the British Museum, where B. was Keeper of Coins and Medals, then Deputy Director.