sentences:  As evidence of the collecting craze, three extensive reference works on the indexing and collecting of provincial tokens were published before 1800 by Pye (first edition in 1795), Birchall (1796), and Conder (1798).None of these three published works were undertaken by accomplished numismatic researchers, but instead were undertaken out of personal interest and were largely based on the personal collections of the authors.Because of the widespread "collecting mania", a great number of extremely well preserved tokens survive today, having been tucked away in private collections for decades.