Editor's Message: Red Book Quarterly Winter 2025

As with all milestones, a bit of history is in order to recognize how this publication came to being. The magazine you hold in your hands—or are reading digitally—was previously titled the CPG® Coin & Currency Market Review. This publication made its debut in January 2018, but its history starts a year prior to that, in 2017. CPG stands for “Collector’s Price Guide.” We created the CPG as a response to a divergence in the rare coin market that had been steadily widening for a decade. As I wrote in that inaugural CPG issue, “For many years there have been multiple sources of retail pricing while at the same time there has been only one primary source for wholesale pricing… the disconnect between wholesale and retail pricing grew to a point where both coin dealers and collectors became confused about the proper pricing standard.”

Once we were confident that our CPG data was addressing this problem we proceeded with creating a print edition. We approached the CPG® Market Review with a different strategy in comparison to the Monthly Greysheet®. It was aimed at the widest possible range of collectors, with feature articles designed to stimulate their passion for coins and to hopefully grow their excitement and dedication to the hobby. We made efforts to get the CPG into as many hands as possible, sending out boxes of magazines for free to any coin show or coin club that asked. They were also the part of “goodie bags” at major conventions such as FUN and the ANA World’s Fair of Money™. This wide distribution helped familiarize both dealers and collectors with CPG pricing and its intended application. Over time, it has become a trusted source of retail pricing that collectors know is regularly updated with the latest data.

With our acquisition of the historic Whitman imprint, we quickly recognized the importance of The Guide Book of United States Coins, known to all as the “Red Book.” This book is an institution, used at one point or another by virtually every coin collector in this country over the past 70-plus years. With this kind of brand recognition, it only made sense to rebrand the CPG® Market Review as the Red Book Quarterly™, or “RBQ”. With the Red Book being an annual publication, we thought, why not use our quarterly price guide as an extension of this? So, while the Red Book is a singular reference that gives great information on all coin series, including background information on how that particular coin came to be, the designers, composition, size, etc., the RBQ is its companion with up-to-the-minute pricing that may have changed since the Red Book was printed.

Looking back on that first issue of the CPG in 2018, the gold spot price was $1,253 and silver was at $15.80. Who could have guessed where these prices would stand today?! Much is the same for many rare coin prices; we have seen very solid growth across many series, and there has been an increase in the number of collectors as well. We hope this publication can be a small part of continuing to increase those numbers!

Sincerely,

Patrick Ian Perez, patrick@whitmanbrands.com