The New Successful Coin Hunting

  I stayed up last night and finished what must be a standard in literature on the subject of treasure hunting, Charles Garrett's The New Successful Coin Hunting. With 259 illustrated pages, it is about as comprehensive as a single metal detecting guide can be. The full range of usual topics is covered, from basic detector maintenance, to elaborate lists of good hunting spots, proper detecting form, digging techniques, underwater hunting and dredging, coin collecting and cleaning, and a myriad of treasure finding tales and photos of coin spilling caches. I believe it would be impossible for any metal detecting enthusiast to read the volume without being totally captivated.
  That being said, the book is fairly goofy. I don't know what it is about Charles Garrett. I mean, he is a master of the craft, with 50 years of MD design under his belt and as many years of treasure hunting all over the globe. He says somewhere in the book that he has hunted every continent except Antarctica. Still, there is some weird naivete that never fails to make me uncomfortable. It isn't so much Charles Garrett himself, who I find to be about as genuine, sincere, and upright as a person can be--it is his products. The book's one downfall is its corniness, from the hilarious photos of eager young couples happily finding pennies in a sandbox playground to the photo of the "pretty girl" finding coins on the beach, from the unfortunate suggestion that one should spend time watching children at play in the park in order to see where money might likely be dropped to the idea that chain link fences surrounding grocery stores should be checked for blowing paper currency. Even some of Garrett's "green machines" have a certain level of silliness in their design. I seem to recall reading about one of their machines that actually had a woman's electronic voice telling the MD'r how deep the item was they were hunting, a feature which many complained nearly drove them to madness.

  Yet, the book The New Successful Coin Hunting is a must-read for anyone interested in the subject. It is staying on my bookshelf and will certainly be referred to later. If nothing else, Charles Garrett has inspired me to broaden my Treasure Hunting horizons beyond simply searching old homesteads and farms for coins and relics. There is a whole world of cache hunting, gold hunting, shallow water hunting, underwater diving, dredging and sluicing, and indoor cache hunting out to be explored. I have even decided to add the Garrett Pocket-Probe (I know that sounds suspect) to my repertoire for hunting walls and the spines of old books, which apparently were popular places to hide valuable coins back when people still owned books.