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Some thoughts on this excellent catalog collection that took around quater of a century to complete...
No doubt that ideally, I would love to see information in the catalog the way it is presented above, without replacing plates, but adding images to descriptions. Having an image of a coin together with its description, and with a modern photo of a coin that fits that description just makes sense to me. This would create a very interesting mix that connects past, present and is much more appealing to an eye. This is only an idea at this stage, that I tried out in the past in a form of a database, converting a couple of Pual I coin plates to a similar organised form. It looked great, however, I aborted the online database project as it was too time consuming, expensive and even though it was very userfriendly but required people to have some basic understanding in using database.
For now, I've decided to present PDF copies of the actual original catalogs that can be found on the net if you search long enough. I collected them from different sources a few year ago and used them since. I am sure that they are not exclusive to this site, but what I also know one may have to look for them long and hard before finding. Even though, they are "free-to-air", you will find them to be very useful. These catalogs and additional books are the basis for any good Russian coins catalog, including Bitkin, Uzhenikov and Diakov. They were created under patronage of Grand Duke Georgii Mikhailovich, who employed his position, access to the expertise and collection of Count Tolstoy, museums and other private collections. He also employed wonderful talents of HkHk Giel, MG Demmeni, AA Ilyin, and II Gladkoy for putting these catalogs together. Catalogs collective publications over 25 years became known as Corpus of Russian Imperial Coins. These catalogs are old, but are still as relevant as they ever were for the periods that they cover.
Nicholas II coin catalog was probably only at a project stage and has never been completed. Second volume of the catalog of Peter the Great coins is missing the descriptions of the coins and the documents, and runs only to 1719. This is due to publications being interrupted by historica events. Quality colorful pictures and some additional coin variations that were lately discovered and published in literature or on forums would be a great addition to these catalogs, but we have what we have - a huge volume of work with excellent presentation for the time. As any huge work it has some mistakes and errors, but compared to the usefulness of these catalogs they may be omited from critisism.
As far as I am aware, Diakov's cagalogs are based on this work, and probably would serve modern collectors as well or even better, as they have renewed photographs of the coins that Diakov manage to take in museums, and hopefully adding to missing discription, variants and types. So, if you are like me, love Corpus of Russian Coins, but crave for better quality pictures, you will love Diakov publications. Take my word for that or not, in any case, his catalogs are now on my shopping list. As to my research effort on current status coins from corpus and collecting modern photographs of the corpus coins, you can see it on Staraya Moneta site following this link.
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