A Penny Saved – R.S. Yeoman and His Red Book

Coin collectors have depended on A Guide Book of United States Coins for generations, making the Official Red Book a world-renowned bestseller with more than 25 million copies sold. Today its famous red cover can be spotted at coin shops, conventions, auctions, and on the bookshelves of collectors from coast to coast. But the Red Book had its humble beginnings with a small Wisconsin publishing company, a simple penny board, and a man who would become a numismatic giant: Richard Sperry Yeo, known to millions of coin collectors as R.S. Yeoman.

In A Penny Saved, best-selling author Ken Bressett has compiled the most complete historical record of the Red Book and the life of its creator, including never-before-published documents from the Whitman archives.

Bressett, who worked alongside Yeoman and has left his own indelible imprint on the hobby, also tells his own life story in and out of numismatics. Inside A Penny Saved is a treasure trove of family photos, memorabilia, and personal recollections about the Red Book and the people who made it remarkable.

The Red Book revolutionized the hobby and made coin collecting accessible to people of all ages, interests, and budgets. Now almost 80 years young and going strong, its popularity has endured thanks to a lifelong labor of love by Yeoman, Editor Emeritus Kenneth Bressett, current editors Jeff Garrett and John Feigenbaum, and thousands of researchers, coin dealers, and everyday collectors since the 1940s.