Failed Coinage

How does the saying go? December showers bring January... nothing really, unless the ground is still damp enough to freeze solid. It rained much of the night last night and much of the day today, leaving large puddles in our back yard and an even larger one in our neighbor's back yard. A cold rain, but not an icy one. It felt like a slice of March broke lose and lodged here in mid-December. I like it, but it can mean only one thing: a few rounds of blizzard in the not-too-distant future.

I was bummed to read that the number of presidential coins minted going forward is going to be slashed. That's two of my favorite things, coins and presidents, in one package. But I have to say that I haven't gotten around to collecting any of the presidential dollars, either in circulating or proof condition. On those few occasions when I get cash from a human teller at a bank, I ask for dollar coins (and sometimes $2 bills), and usually they have some presidentials along with Sacagaweas and even Susan B. Anthony pieces. Then I go out and circulate them.

I don't actually want to see the $1 bill discontinued, since it's iconic, but I don't mind using dollar coins, either. I'd go for U.S. $2 coins, too, as long as the $1 and $2 pieces were distinctive enough, like the Canadian loonie and toonie.

In an idle moment today I rummaged through the container where I keep the small change of other nations that I've accumulated over the years, and it occurred to me -- since I've been writing some about the problems of the euro lately -- that I have some defunct currency in that container. At the moment there are 17 euro-zone nations, and I found bits of the former currencies of nine of those countries in my possession, ten if you count 1 pataca from Portuguese Macao, all as worthless as car-wash tokens from car washes that have gone out of business.

Besides the pataca, the others include: 1 DM, 20 French centimes, 100 Italian lira, 1 Dutch guilder, 10 Belgian francs, 1 Austrian schilling, 1 Finnish mark, 20 Estonian senti and 50 drachma. All collected in their countries of origin, except for that drachma. While in St. Petersburg, Russia, we stayed in a guesthouse with WCs down the hall. One time I went to use the bathroom, and there sitting on top of the tank was a 50 drachma coin.

Mostly copper, between the size of a quarter and a half-dollar, and minted in 1988, the coin sports an image of Homer on one side, a trireme on the other. It's a nice piece of money. Bet the Greeks are missing their drachma something fierce about now.

Union Shield

Uneventful weekend around here, with reports of tumult in exotic places -- Benghazi, Manama, Madison -- leaking in through electronic media. Also, there seems to be an election under way in Chicago, unusual because no one named Daley is on the ballot. Another thing that didn't happen here was more blizzard. I hear Minnesota and the UP got most of that; we just got a dusting of snow last night, following clouds and rain much of the rest of the weekend.

Recently I ran across a slide show on Bankrate.com -- interesting that the term "slide show" has a new lease on life, now that actual slides are relics -- called [Six] money habits that are illegal. Mostly pedestrian stuff, such as lying on a loan application or writing bad checks. But one was odd: "Color printers, scanners and copiers make it surprisingly easy for just about anyone to replicate U.S. or foreign currency," it said. "But it is, in fact, illegal to print your own money and try to spend it to buy goods or services."

Odd because who doesn't know that? And whose habit is that, anyway? Besides people who are already criminals, that is. Maybe "habit" wasn't quite the word for that headline.

At the bank today I noticed some dollar coins and half dollars in the tray, so I got some instead of one of the (genuine) paper notes I was going to ask for. "We don't have them most of the time," the teller said. "Only if someone brings them in."

I was hoping for an obscure president on the dollar coin. William Henry Harrison, maybe. Or Tyler or Taylor or Pierce. But no, I got some Lincolns, which was all he had. That's the most recent release, the last one of 2010. Not a bad coin, but he's on a lot of things. On its web site, the U.S. mint has a canned history of his presidency, most interesting for its list of "Coinage Legislation under President Abraham Lincoln." I didn't know that he signed bills authorizing mint branches in Denver, which operates to this day, and Carson City, set up to handle all the silver being mined out west in those days. Also, "Act of March 3, 1865, authorized coinage of the 3-cent piece."

Numismatic nerds, as I once was, know that that means the 3-cent nickel, since a 3-cent silver piece had first been first issued in the 1850s. Silver was in short supply due to the war, however, so nickel was the replacement, even before nickel was used in 5-cent pieces, which began in 1866 (U.S. half dimes contained silver in the mid-19th century). The U.S. 3-cent coin did not survive the 19th century, like the half cent, 2-cent and my own favorite, the 20-cent piece, which was the Susan B. Anthony dollar of its time.

The Lincoln dollar inspired me to take a closer look at the Union Shield cent now in circulation. Last year it became the permanent replacement for the Lincoln Memorial cent, something I didn't realize until a few months ago, because I'm not the numismatic nerd I once was. I like it much better than the Lincoln Memorial design. The memorial is a fine structure in situ, but that doesn't come across very well on the coin. Something like the way the reverse of the modern nickel doesn't do Monticello justice. I remember when I visited Monticello I thought, "That's the building on the nickel?"

The Union Shield design also revives a lost bit of Americana, as generally obscure now as the 3-cent nickel. The new reverse was designed by Lyndall Bass and engraved by Joseph Menna of the mint (note their initials under ONE CENT). Take a moment to look at one of the coins. The penny might not have much of a future, so it might be the last new reverse for the storied Lincoln cent.

EEK

I heard on the radio earlier this month that Estonia has trashed its currency and opted to join the euro zone. I don't quite follow the thinking that went into that, but in any case the Estonia kroon (pronounced "crone," according to the radio) is gone.

Naturally that sent me to my stash of increasingly obsolete foreign coins to see if I had any. All I could find were two 20 Estonian senti pieces, a fifth of a kroon, both dated 1992. That must have been all we had left when we exited the country, which was unusual, because usually we didn't quite spend down our currency quite so completely.

One side (not sure if this is the obverse or reverse):

The other side:

The three lions have long been associated with Estonia. According to the Estonia Institute, that country's equivalent of Germany's Goethe Institut or Spain's Instituto Cervantes, "the heraldic lions of the coat of arms are the most ancient of Estonia's symbols. They have been used since the 13th century, when they served as the big coat of arms for the capital city, Tallinn.

"Tallinn got these slim blue lions from the King of Denmark, Waldemar the Second; Denmark was the ruling power in northern Estonia at that time... Various other foreign powers came and went, but the three lions remained to become the coat of arms for most of the Estonian territory.

"The State Assembly of the independent Republic of Estonia adopted the three lions officially by resolution on June 19, 1925. The current large coat of arms is a golden shield charged with three blue lions passant guardant with golden oak branches on both sides of the shield. The small coat of arms is identical, except there are not any oak branches."

The lions are interesting, but feature I liked best about the kroon is its international code: EEK.

Each To Its Own Currency

A cold, dank way to end November: that was today. There were even small flurries of snow to be seen. But Northern Hemisphere Novembers have cold and dank woven into their essence, so no big deal.

My favorite headline of the day: "Is the Euro Dead? No, But It's Pining for the Fjords." That went with a Megan McArdle posting at the Atlantic web site. Bring 'em back, I say: the mark, the franc, the lira, the schilling, the drachma, the lot of them.

I can't comment on the economics of that, because I can't claim to understand the nuances of currencies. I want them back for aesthetic reasons.

Item From the Past: A Tale of Two Ten Tughrik

In September 1994, we managed to leave Mongolia with two 10-tughrik (or tugrik or tögrög) notes in our possession. These days, 10 tughrik are worth about U.S. 7.6¢, according to the ever-useful XE.com. I'm not sure what the exchange rate was 16 years ago, but I know that it wasn't hugely different. The denomination was definitely small change. In fact, I don't think anything smaller was circulated then.

One of the notes was an older, beaten up, Communist-era piece of currency.

The other was a crisp, new, post-Communist note.

In the early 1920s, the Republic of China, or at least whichever warlord was running the part of China next to Mongolia, determined to negate Mongolia's recently declared (1911) independence by force. The Mongolians resisted and eventually prevailed, in the sense that the country became a Soviet satellite for many decades, rather than part of the Republic of China and then perhaps the People's Republic.

One of the main Mongolian leaders against the Chinese was Sükhbaatar. He appears on both the older the newer notes. It's interesting that the older note dresses him in strictly military garb -- a specimen of the New Communist Man, maybe -- while the newer one has him looking distinctly Mongolian, a national hero up there with a certain 12th/13th-century Mongolian who kicked ass across Eurasia.

Cheap Numismatics

A Guam Quarter turned up in change lately. I'm glad that Guam got a quarter as one of the DC & Territorial series, which also includes DC, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the USVI, and the Northern Marianas. But not US Minor Outlying Islands such as Navassa, home of goats but no people. Navassa also has an "informal" flag, according to FOTW Flags of the World. A completely uninspired design, if you asked me.

This disk also appeared lately at our house, though it's been with us a long time. I just ran across it in an unexpected spot.

It's 10 avos, or one-tenth of a pataca, which is still the currency of the Macau Special Administrative Region, as it's styled now. I got it in change in Macao in September 1990 and it's been in one container or another in my vicinity since then, at least until small hands got a hold of the coin sometime and put it our coffee table drawer.

Cheap oddities made by political entities that don't exist any more, or denominations that don't exist any more; that's what I like when it comes to numismatics. Such as a half-centavo from the U.S. Philippines.

A British West Africa penny. Note the Arabic script.

And two sen from Meiji Japan.

Not many people realize it, but the yen was originally divided into 100 sen, a denomination about as useful as a mill coin in our time would be, when 100 yen isn't quite enough to buy you a drink out of a vending machine.

Making Money

There's a memorable moment in the movie Bugsy (not quoted on imdb, so I'm doing it by memory) when one of Bugsy Siegel's associates objects that something Bugsy wants to do will cost too much money. "Money?" Bugsy says off-handedly. "That's just dirty paper. I'll get some more."

That casual attitude toward money eventually prompted Bugsy's associates to rub him out. Still, it was a good turn of phrase, even though most money isn't paper any more, and probably wasn't in the 1940s, when the movie was set.

While in Dallas, I took a drive over to Ft. Worth to visit the U.S. Bureau of Engraving & Printing Western Currency Facility, where paper money is made, to take a tour of the place. I was mildly amazed that members of the public can take tours at all, and even more amazed that the tours are free. The bureau's public outreach seems pretty sophisticated, however. Maybe they're worried about debit cards finally ushering in that cashless society that's been predicted since the 1970s at least, but that didn't come up during the tour.

We should all hope paper money doesn't go away, since its exchange doesn't depend on electronic devises, and is completely anonymous. Besides, pieces of U.S. currency are remarkable works of art, and well as products of manufacturing virtuosity. Visiting the place where the notes are made confirms that notion. The process is mind-boggling in its complexity, including the special paper -- cloth, really -- and the special inks, the intricate plate-making (done at the eastern facility in DC), the three separate kinds of printing used to create the images and lettering on each note, and the drying, cutting, stacking and bundling. Then there's the matter of keeping track of each and every note produced.

Security was tight for us visitors. No surprise there. To begin with, the entire place is surrounded by serious-looking fencing. At the entrance, you pass through something like an airport metal detector, only a curved door closes behind you while a curved door opens up in front. For a moment, you're in a clear tube, presumably being scanned for things you shouldn't have. Then you ride a shuttle bus a short way to the facility, and once there, the entire tour is down a hallway looking down at the factory floor through windows.

We were just tourists. Work at the bureau and you'll probably spend your career in one small part of the factory floor, which is divided into small sections by tall fences. No casually wandering over to other parts of the floor, and few get to see the entire process in detail. Probably there's little incentive to steal, anyway, since I understand that the jobs are exceedingly desirable and high-paid positions.

"See the fence over there, covered so that no one can see inside?" said our tour guide, an affable young woman. In fact, the area was blocked from view from floor to ceiling by green tarp or some other material. No other part of the facility was blocked in quite that way. "That's where they're going to make the new $100 bill. Very few people know what's going on in there."

Security extended in small ways even to the gift shop, where vistors can buy the usual sorts of items, but also some unique to the Bureau of Engraving & Printing, such as uncut notes. Being a frequent postcard consumer, I checked out the selection, but it was meager. No images of the facility of any kind were for sale, though money-themed cards were available. I bought one (using cash) that features every kind of Federal Reserve Note ever made, up to the $10,000 bill, along with the $100,000 gold certificate. That's cheating on the part of the bureau. Nothing over $100 has been made in years, and the Ft. Worth facility is new enough that the larger notes were never made there.

In case you're wondering, I'll save you a visit to Wiki: McKinley's on the $500 note, Cleveland's on the $1000, Madison's on the $5000, and Salmon P. Chase is on the $10,000. As for the $100,000 certificate, previously used only for transactions between Federal Reserve banks, Woodrow Wilson is on it.

Loose Change

Rain all day and into the night. The grass and other plants will appreciate it. So do I.

Even on a rainy day, when your dentist tells you nothing else needs to be done to your teeth after a session of cleaning, that puts a spring in your step. Doubly so when the dentist says the same thing about your eldest daughter's teeth, or maybe triply so, since that eldest daughter often has holes that need filling.

Anyway, I dodged some uncomfortable and expensive dentistry again -- for now -- though I do grumble about the cost of cleaning and inspection. Insurance merely drops the price from astronomical to pretty high. But then again, on an annual basis such maintenance isn't so expensive, considering the use that my teeth get.

Later in the day, I noticed this in my pocket change:

A buffalo nickel! In my entire life of handling coins, I've never gotten one of these in pocket change. I was born too late. I am old enough to remember finding silver Roosevelt dimes (and one or two Mercury dimes), silver Washington quarters, silver Kennedy halves and lots of wheat pennies, including one or two 1943 steel cents, but no buffalo nickels.

Of course, as a collectible, it's garden-variety stuff -- a 1936 Denver strike, one of some 24.8 million nickels made at that mint that year, meaning it's not a rarity. Also, it's in Very Good condition at best. So maybe it would fetch $1.50, but I'll never find out, since I'm keeping it.

Remarkably (or maybe not so remarkably) there's a web site devoted just to buffalo nickels, and it tells me that fully 119 million buffaloes were minted at Philadelphia in '36, the most by far of any year and mint for the series. Why so many that year? The answer's somewhere deep in the archives of the Bureau of the Mint, probably.

A few weeks ago, I was at a store, and I noticed a yellowish coin next to the register's cash drawer. It wasn't anything made by the US mint, but I couldn't get close enough to see where it was from.

"What's that coin?" I asked.

"I don't know," the kid behind the counter said.

"Can I look at it?"

"Here, you can have it."

And so I do. It's a 20-centavo piece of recent (1999) vintage. These days, one peso trades for about 9.5¢, so I walked away from that store 1.9¢ richer, if in fact you could trade sums so small. I think I'll keep it, too.

According to Wiki, the reverse not only sports the value of the coin, but the leafage also represents, somehow, "Ácatl (13th day of the Aztec calendar)." I wonder how many Mexicans know that. I suspect that it's proportional to the number of Americans who know that Monticello is on the reverse of the Jefferson nickel, or what the Latin on the dollar bill means (besides E Pluribus Unum, which everyone knows. Right?)

Anyway, it made my day to go into a store and pick up an object unexpectedly that includes something Aztec. I suppose the snake and the eagle have Aztec roots, too, but not from the Aztec calendar.

No Mashing the Maple-Leaf Penny

I’ll pick up again with scenic wonders of the Canadian Rockies and even North Dakota on Sunday or, the weekend proves really busy, Monday. Today I have to take up the topic of elongated souvenir pennies in Canada.

Most of my life, I’d ignored those machines, usually found at tourist destinations, that mash pennies into souvenirs. But while we were in Florida early last year, Lilly started asking for them, and I mashed her a few from the Kennedy Space Center, the Florida Aquarium in Tampa and so on.

By the time we went to Yellowstone last August, she’d become a collector, mostly pennies from machines she found herself, but also a few from machines that I’d encountered, such as one at the Central Park Zoo when I was there by myself last September. At that zoo, I also bought her an album in which to keep her mashed pennies, since by then we had quite a few knocking around loose. I’m happy buy her mashed pennies because, like postcards, it’s a fairly cheap way to get place-specific mementos. She now has 22 from seven U.S. states and one Canadian province.

Lilly kept an eye out for mash machines on this trip. True to zoo form, there was one at the Red River Zoo in Fargo. Would there be any in Canada? Sure enough, there were. Same concept, same kind of hand-crank equipment, but a couple of differences. For one thing, each souvenir cent cost C$1, or about US90¢, while the U.S. price is 50¢ (or 51¢, counting the penny you take out of circulation). So it cost a loonie. A little annoying, but I was willing to pay.

But that wasn’t the peculiar thing. Each penny-mashing machines that I saw in Canada sported a tray built into the side, like a coin-return tray, except that it was full of U.S. cents. A small sign said to use these for making souvenir pennies. So we did.

This week, while wasting time on the Internet, I came across a web site dedicated to the mashed-penny hobby. According to that site, in Canada it’s unlawful to mutilate currency for any reason, as opposed to in the U.S., where it’s illegal only for fraudulent purposes. Just another example of the regulatory-happy Canadian federal government, eh? Anyway, to avoid legal entanglements, the owners of the penny-mashers in the Great White North stock ’em with cheap yet spanking-new copper-coated/zinc-base portraits of Abe Lincoln, which visitors to Canadian tourist attractions are free to mash to their heart’s content.

A Groszy Day

Went downtown today to see a man about an airport. An airport that hasn’t been built yet, in a faraway state -- and yet someday I might be writing about, along with related developments, because there are always related developments, since airports are economic engines of our age with few parallels. Interesting where the paths of self-employment might be leading. More as it happens (months from now, probably).

Clear and warm, today was just right for walking from Union Station to Michigan Avenue, and later back. Funny, I didn’t feel like I’d been away from the Loop for long, though the last time I was downtown was about two months ago. It has the same pace and rhythms as always, though a few shops had closed, and a few others had opened—the usual retail churn.

Just off Michigan Ave. south of the Chicago River, there’s now a “Chicago Tourist Office,” which offers information, a Hot Tix location, and an area for exhibits. Today it had a history of candymaking in Chicago, a timeline across the wall illustrated by photos, ads and old packaging. One full-page magazine ad, from a boy’s magazine of the 1920s, claimed that (I’m paraphrasing) Baby Ruths were no candy for wimps, but “fit for two-fisted men.” I enjoy old ads as much as Lileks, I think. Wish I’d thought of making books out of them.

Another Chicago touch of the day: I bought one thing, and in my change I got a 20 groszy piece, which is one-fifth of a zloty, the currency of Poland, at least until they’re suckered into the euro. There’s a lot of back-and-forth between Chicago and Poland, so that isn’t as strange as it might sound. The coin is the same diameter and color as a dime, and dated 1998.

Between 1994, when we were there, and 1998, the country must have redenominated its money. There were no coins in circulation in Poland 11 years ago, only notes, and if I remember right, it was about 10,000 zloty to the dollar. The only “smaller” currency we encountered on our long trip that year was the rupiah of Indonesia, at about 20,000 to the dollar.