Evans, George Greenlief (1885)
Book Summary
The constant flow of visitors to the United States Mint, combined with old fashioned American capitalism, ensured that some book of this kind would eventually be created. Naturally it includes an overview of the Mint Cabinet, a tourist magnet in former times, along with history of the Mint operations and coinage. The best selling numismatic book of its era, Evans claimed to have sold over one hundred thousand copies, many distributed along with George Soley medalets struck on the first steam coinage press, and today the breadth of variants is still not fully catalogued. George Kolbe has come the closest, discussing Frank Van Zandt's collection of 158 copies of Evans, in his 104th sale of November, 2007. Though hardly a paradigm of scholarship, Evans remains a significant text as the most widely known American numismatic work at the close of the nineteenth century. Voted #58 of the top one hundred items of numismatic literature in a survey by the Numismatic Bibliomania Society.
