This is a setup for Chris, the owner of Rotographic Publications but I'll beat him to it. The books you want are Roman Silver Coins and Roman Base Metal Coins (see top of the page). I have found both very useful. As I have just bought a batch of uncleaned Roman coins myself, I would be interested to know why you found yours so bad. Mine were okay, but nothing spectacular. I guess the fun is in cleaning them up and identifying them, but in my case this is likely to take some time. As far as American coins are concerned, there are a number of collectors from across the pond on this website, and no doubt when the sun catches up with them, they will help you out. thanks for the quick reply, out of the 50 coins only about 30 had any markings on the other 20 were completely blank, out of the 30 only half had any sort of writting on them although some of them did have other good detail to them, I have so far managed to identify 5 of them but some are just 1/2s of coins, do you know of any good websites for identifying these coins? which buyer did you buy your coins from?