Getting started in a new hobby can be daunting. Sometimes it feels like you need to climb a mountain of knowledge just to begin. Have you experienced this feeling yourself? Maybe you started as a stamp collector and decided to cross over into coins. Or maybe you’ve always collected coins and you moved from Morgan dollars to branch-mint gold, or from 20th-century type coins to half cents and large cents. How would you feel today if you started collecting something totally new to you — colonial coins, or modern paintings, or antique furniture?

Now imagine someone completely new to coin collecting — perhaps a young collector just starting out, with no experience and little idea where and how to start.

Whitman Publishing helps those beginner and intermediate collectors with a new line of coin books. We’re calling them Search & Save because they get back to the hobby’s roots of searching through your pocket change and bank rolls and building a coin collection from there. Each volume consists of an illustrated 64-page book bound with a Whitman Classic Coin Album page for storing and displaying coins. 

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The first three books cover Lincoln cents, nickels, and State quarters. (Additional volumes on dimes and quarters, half dollars, and dollar coins will debut later in 2016.) Many of the Search & Save coins can be collected from circulation. Others require some hunting at local coin shops, online, or at a coin show.

The books take a fun storytelling approach, entertaining the readers as they learn. The text and colorful illustrations tell the stories behind the coins, with characters like young Abraham Lincoln, the clever businessman Joseph Wharton, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, Indian explorer Sacagawea, and wealthy super-collector Colonel E.H.R. Green. They take readers onto the battlefields of World War II and into nickelodeon parlors in the 1890s, the buffalo pastures of the Wild West, the bustling streets of New York City, and a hundred other places in American history.

Our goal with these Search & Save books is for the reader to learn about each coin, and, with our guidance, to enjoy the fun of building their own personalized collection. When they’re done they’ll not only have a valuable coin collection, but they’ll also be able to tell each coin’s story and share them with their friends and family.

We expect the low retail price of $9.95 will encourage new collectors. And because Whitman Publishing is the Official Supplier of the American Numismatic Association, ANA members receive 10 percent off the Search & Save books when purchasing directly.

By making coin collecting approachable and entertaining, and giving readers a challenging but not impossible goal (filling up a coin-album board), we hope to bring a new generation of collectors — of all ages — into the hobby. What do you think? I can be reached at dennis.tucker@whitmanbooks.com.

Dennis Tucker is publisher of Whitman Publishing Company and author of American Gold and Silver: U.S. Mint Collector and Investor Coins and Medals, Bicentennial to Date.