The 2026 World’s Fair of Money

For the first time since 2019, I attended the annual summer convention of the American Numismatic Association, branded as The World’s Fair of Money®. (The late winter convention is the National Money Show®.) This year the WFM was held in Pittsburgh. Having been away from the hobby for several years, I went only to renew or discover  friendships and I did not deliver a presentation though I judged Literature exhibits. The Literature category had three entrants: The Works of David R. Sear, Selected Banknote Reporters, and Selected Works of Charles Trissler Steigerwalt.

I attended the judges orientation on Tuesday and started rating the exhibits that afternoon. With me was my host in Pittsburgh, a lifelong printer and typesetter. We read the exhibits and talked about them that afternoon and into the evening. When I returned to the convention Wednesday morning, I reviewed my work. In my opinion, all of the Literature exhibits had problems that prevented any of them from a clear first place award. 

First place went to The Works of David R. Sear. The ten display cases held nice, newish copies of the editions of his books. All of the books were closed. Not presented were page proofs, mark-ups, or manuscripts. Nothing was said about content added or deleted across editions. The need to change prices was mentioned but without explanations of cause, only a tautologous statement that rising prices caused prices to change necessitating a new edition.

Historian Dennis Boggs
www.meetmrlincoln.com

Cards around the volumes carried lines and paragraphs about Sear and how he became the leading author of these catalog price guides for Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins. In my opinion, the best thing about the exhibit was the typesetting on the note cards which were mounted on foam-core panels. 

After I turned in my judging forms, I was free to explore the convention and meet people. With my reporter’s notebook in hand, I introduced myself with my business card, saying that I would be writing about the convention for both online and print media. 

Near the center of the floor, opposite the U.S. Mint, the four representatives of Goldback did not go on record or talk to me and insisted that only the CEO or publicity manager was authorized to speak for the company and no one went on record because they were unauthorized to say that their pricing information is proprietary and not for public release. However, Goldback issued demonstration notes for the convention and those were giveaways on the floor. 

Some of the recent issues of T&S Coins of Vilnius.

T&S Coin of Vilnius was also on the Promenade at booth 1033.  Their representative, Julija Markauskienė, sat down with me to outline their business model and marketing. T&S Coin (https://www.ts-coin.com) specializes in high-relief silver celebrations, limited to 500 pieces per design. The newest products are 2-ounce coins. Many series are colorized. The premium product is sold wholesale to dealers who have pre-positioned customers for these memorials to pirates, samurai, Amazons, elves, the Knights Templar, and very many other popular themes. Coins denominated in dollars have been issued for Liberia and Niue. For Cameroun, the denominations have been in francs. 

Julija Markauskienė greets a customer.

Julija Markauskienė told me that their issues are usually 95% sold out when released. As a result, she said, there is an active secondary market. She told me that their sales break out into roughly one-third each in Europe, Asia, and North America.  

Vintage Collectibles Group (Florida) and Omaha Collectibles Group (Nebraska) are the banners for Matthew Brotherton of Knoxville, Tennessee. A graduate of the University of Tennessee College of Law, Matt came to numismatics because his father was a collector. He told me that he loves history and loves to travel. 

It was nice to stop by and chat with Jonathan K. Kern of Lexington, Kentucky. Long ago, he helped me acquire an ancient Greek coin for my collection, “Towns and Times of Philosophers.” Our children are about the same age. In addition to ancients, Kern works with US federal and related coinage, and he is a PCGS-authorized dealer for direct grading submittals. 

My introduction to numismatics came from Liberty Coin Service of Lansing, Michigan. Back in 1972, the owner, Bill Bradford, and I sat on a curb outside the East Lansing State Bank where he had a box. A few weeks later, he had a counter in a jewelry store. The next year he had the whole store. Ten years later, an admirer of H. L. Mencken’s The American Mercury, he retired from numismatics to start Liberty magazine, selling the store to Pat Heller. Nominally, Pat retired a few years ago, but he was at the show. I met him at the Exhibits on  Tuesday afternoon, and he was at the LCS booth the next day. 

Tyrants of the Golden Horn is a museum experience. The traveling exhibit is called the world’s most valuable private collection. It embraces “tyrants” from the Tigris to the Thames by displaying the highest quality examples of their most valuable circulating coins, such as the gold solidus of Constantinople. From the first Roman coins struck there to the first modern issues of Turkey, they say that their hallways offer a complete inventory of rulers. Find their website at https://www.thetyrantcollection.com/the-collection/

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Numismatic Truthseekers 

I Took My Change in Baybucks 

Numismatics: The Standard of Proof in Economics 

The Future of Money 

Numismatics: History as Market 

“Money Talks” of the American Numismatic Association

As a longtime admirer of the works of Ayn Rand, I hold money in high regard. The origin of money is in ritual gift exchange, rather than in economic calculation, which came tens of thousands of years of later. That being so, it remains that periodic innovations in economic calculation caused quantum leaps in prosperity and general welfare. People are unlikely to kill or die for what they can sell or buy. 

But I never joined any organizations for numismatics until after 1992. For one thing, I was never a serious collector and still am not. I attended a couple of lectures by Clifford Mishler, then the president of Krause Corporation, publishers of hobby periodicals and books, and later president of the American Numismatic Association. He said that all collectors, whether of coins, stamps, automobiles, vinyl recordings, wine or anything else, share four passions: Completeness, Condition, Rarity, and Value. Those are not my concerns. If I have one of something, regardless of its condition or value, I have an artifact about which there is a story to be told. Coins in particular are the often the most common artifact of any society. You have to be a serious collector to find a truly rare coin. 

 

In 1992, I started hearing the ANA “Money Talks” radio program in the mornings as I was waking up to get ready for work. The ANA says: 

In 1992, “Money Talks,” a radio program on the history and lore of money, began broadcasting across the country on several local radio stations. The “Money Talks” broadcasts were typically 2-4 minutes long and consisted of coin stories that were recorded to educate and encourage interest in the hobby of numismatics.

 

I submitted about 20 scripts, and about half of them were produced for broadcast. The ANA granted me a literary award for a couple of them. 

https://www.money.org/money-talks-radio-archive/

I went on to write more full-length features about Peace Dollars, Large Cents, and other products of U.S. Mint. I also edited a monthly column, Internet Connections, which spotlighted safe and informative websites for collectors, typically, national mints or museums, specialty clubs, and sometimes the websites of dealers who were serious researchers.  

 

 https://archive.org/details/bestofanamtpart1

https://archive.org/details/bestofanamtpart2

The ANA rebranded “Money Talks” as a series of lectures at the semi-annual conventions, and many of them have been recorded and placed in video archives such as YouTube. 

Pay Warrants of the Texian Navy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWGzivjlOUI

The Texas Navy on NecessaryFacts 

Mutiny Aboard the San Antonio  

IRELAND'S POET LAUREATE by Michael Marotta 

 

"Our coins must pitch and spin to please the gambler, and pack into rolls to please the banker." Those were the words of Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 and was regarded as the greatest poet of his time. He was also in charge of the committee that designed Ireland's coins.

 

Yeats was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865. At that time Ireland was completely under the control of England. While working in England, Yeats joined other Irish patriots who eventually won independence for the Emerald Isle. A world-renown playwright and poet, Yeats was elected to the Irish Senate. He chaired the committee that chose the designs for the coins of the new Irish Free State.

Yeats had seen classical Greek coins while studying and writing in Italy during the late 1800s. He arranged for all of the artists on this project to receive ancient Hellenistic coins, so they could see for themselves the powerful images he wanted to bring to Ireland's coins.

 

For over seventy years, Ireland's coins changed little from the winning designs of Percy Metcalf, a young sculptor recommended by the British School in Rome and selected by Yeats' committee. The horse, bull, salmon, hound and other animals of Ireland's eight circulating coins were all joined by a common symbol of Ireland's poetic tradition: the Celtic harp.

 

William Yeats died on January 28, 1939, at the age of 73.

 

(Numismatist, historian, and jurist Theodor Mommsen, was granted a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902.)

 

A.N.A. MONEY TALKS Transcript No. 1400 

ANCIENT HEARTS by Michael E. Marotta 

Look around . . . heart symbols are everywhere on Valentine's Day. 

Maybe even on a coin. 

The first heart symbols that appeared on ancient coins were produced 2500 years ago in North Africa. 

The town of Cyrene was founded in the 7th century B.C. by Greeks. 

Their town was eventually destroyed, but it was near what today is the city of Benghazi, along the coast of Libya. 

The city enjoyed modest prosperity . . . until its inhabitants 

discovered the silphium plant. (The plant is extinct now, but its closest 

living relative is a key ingredient in Worcestershire sauce.) Silphium was 

used as an herb. Its stalk was edible. Its pungent sap was the basis for cough syrups, and gave food an interesting flavor. But the most important use for silphium was as a contraceptive. 

 

Modern research suggests that silphium actually worked, and because of this, it was in great demand. Attempts to cultivate it in Syria and Greece were unsuccessful. It only grew near Cyrene--and, starting in 500 B.C., it became a steady source of income for the townspeople. By Roman times, silphium had been harvested to extinction. 

Over the centuries, the silphium plant came to symbolize Cyrene. The plant appeared on the town's gold, silver and bronze coins, starting around 500 B.C. Often the entire plant was shown. But sometimes, only the seeds of the plant were depicted. The silphium's seeds were heart-shaped, and those heart-shaped seeds that appeared on Cyrene's coins eventually came to symbolize love--a symbol that's still with us today. 

 

Today's program was written by Michael Marotta. "Money Talks" is 

a production of the American Numismatic Association in Colorado Springs, 

America's coin club for over a century. Take a tour of ANA's virtual Money Museum on the Web at www.money.org.

  

Transcript No. 1329                              November 6, 1997

THE MYSTERY OF THE MINT       by Michael Marotta     

 

Imagine a world without coins.  It isn't easy.  Coins and paper money are basic to our civilization.  Yet someone had to invent coins, and the truth is that we just do not know why coins were invented.     

 

Coins first appeared about 2,600 years ago in the ancient country of Lydia, in what is today western Turkey.  But people in the Middle East had already been using gold, silver, copper and other common trade goods as money for thousands of years, going as far back as perhaps 8000 B.C.E.     

 

From our modern viewpoint, the advantages of coinage are obvious. But those advantages were not so obvious to ancient peoples. Today, there are several theories to explain the invention of coinage. Many people think that merchants invented coins by marking nuggets and ingots of precious metals.  The marks were promises of purity and value. 

 

Another theory is that coins were invented to serve temples. After all, ancient coins have gods and goddesses on them.  Temples amassed wealth from donations and the temples might have issued the coins as rewards for good behavior. 

 

However, some scholars today think that the first coins were given to the mercenary soldiers of Greek towns.  These coins may have been like military campaign medals -- badges of honor that may not have been intended to be spent as money.

 

Whatever the origins of coinage, the idea spread rapidly.  Within a hundred years, almost every Greek town from southern Russia to eastern Spain had its own mint.  Today, people collect ancient coins for their historic value and artistic beauty.     

 

This has been "Money Talks."  Today's program was written by Michael Marotta and underwritten by Whitman Coin Products, a division of GoldenBooks, quality coin supplies at affordable prices.  "Money Talks" is a copyrighted production of the American Numismatic Association, 818 N.Cascade Ave., Colorado Springs, CO 80903, 719/632-2646, ana@money.org,http://www.money.org.

 

 

ANA: MT: Use of Mintmarks                                    

Transcript No. 1648                                                      January 27, 1999

 

USE OF MINTMARKS  by Michael E. Marotta

 

    If you look closely at coins, you will find that some of them have small letters indicating the mint at which they were struck.  Mintmarks go back to ancient times.  They were used to prevent forgery as well as to honor the mintmaster.

 

    Mintmarks date to about the year 400 B.C.  At the time, Greek towns elected their moneyers or mintmasters to annual terms of office.  These men ometimes were the actual die cutters, but usually they were officials who oversaw the cutting of dies and striking of coins.

 

    The mintmaster might engrave his whole name on a die, or just the first letters of his name.  Sometimes he made a "monogram."  The purpose was twofold.  It allowed praise for the man who did the work and identified the person responsible in case the coinage later proved to be of short weight or impure alloy.

 

   When the Roman Empire stretched across three continents, it operated more than 20 different mints with over 50 different mintmarks for a period of 300 years.  We have identified the mintmarks of London in England; Constantinople in Turkey; and Alexandria in Egypt.

 

    Today most nations have only one mint.  Larger countries often assign letters of the alphabet to identify mint cities, starting with the nation's capital.  On French coins, for example, the letter "A" stands for Paris. An "A" on a German coin, on the other hand, usually means "Berlin."

 

    Some nations contract out the production of their coinage.  On some British and Canadian coins, for example, the letter "H" stands for the "Heaton" company.

 

    In the United States, the main mint at Philadelphia typically did not use the "P" mintmark until recent decades.  Today, most American coins have either a "P" for "Philadelphia" or "D" for "Denver."  Usually you will see an "S" for "San Francisco" or "W" for "West Point" only on special coins and proof sets.

 

    This has been "Money Talks."  Today's program was written by Michael Marotta and underwritten by Whitman Coin Products, a division of Golden Books, the right choice for coin collecting books and supplies. "Money Talks" is a copyrighted production of the American Numismatic Association, 818 N. Cascade Ave., Colorado Springs, CO 80903, 719/632-2646, ana@money.org, http://www.money.org.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Accounting for Civilization 

Debt: The Seed of Civilization 

Robert Leonard’s “Curious Currency” 

Numismatics; History as Market 

Money as Speech and Peacemaking 

The Future of Money 

Mere Gold is Not Enough: Hayek’s “Denationalization” 

Numismatics: The Standard of Proof in Economics 

Scripophily 

The Art of Finance 

Challenge Coins 

 

Not Conned by Seghal’s Coined 

My Numismatic Bibliography (Partial List) 

 

The Future of Money

In the future, we will recognize money created by individuals, rather than by organizations. Individuals such as Taylor Swift, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Oprah Winfrey are certainly in positions of visibility and trust to enable that. 

(This is based on “The Future of Money,” delivered for the Maynard Sundman/Littleton Coin Lecture Series, at the American Numismatic Association “World’s Fair of Money” in Chicago, on August 14, 2019.)  

Third-party trust services such as Paypal could enable everyone to issue their own personal money. We have had reporting mechanism such as Moody’s and Barron’s for over 100 years. And of course, we now have Equifax, TransUnion, Experian. But they are only the inheritors of the Bank Note Reporters of the early to mid 19^thcentury.

Money markets could be radically restructured by some new reporting mechanism. In a session on the future of law at the Armadillocon-41 science fiction convention in Austin last week, it was suggested that the blockchain mechanism could allow evolving contracts. So, too, would a blockchain identity manager allow you to always show the spendability of the money you issue.

The New Approach to Freedom by E.C. Riegel
and Flight from Inflation by E. C. Riegel

 The idea of personal money was explained in two books from the 1930s. A New Approach to Freedom and The Flight from Inflation by E. C. Riegel. They would have remained even more obscure than they are had they not been touted to the libertarian community by Harry Browne, the author of How to Profit from a Monetary Crisis and other books consumed by gold bugs. For that he was the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000.

Economists define money as being a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. Those are already decoupled. The dollar is not a good store of value, but it is a unit of account for multinational corporations, even those headquartered outside the United States. In the future, and actually right now today, money will be defined by something you have, something you know, or something you are. 

I assert as my own theory that alone on an island, Robinson Crusoe would need money, just as he needed language and for the same purposes. We will see that money and language are tightly bound. Robinson Crusoe would need to know whether it was more efficient and effective to catch fish, gather cocoanuts, plant wheat, or hunt pigs. She would need a way to track his efforts and successes in order that he could survive and thrive. He needs mechanisms for accounting for his work and for storing his effort. Having an abundance of dried fish, the realities of supply and demand and of diminishing returns might induce her to seek wild fruits or edible tubers, both of which might become cultivated crops. But without money – even intuitively -she has no way to know. You might think that Robinson Crusoe has no need for exchange, but whether he eats a fish now, dries it for later, or buries it to condition the soil are exchanges.  

During the great fairs of the Middle Ages, bankers met to clear their books of assets and liabilities and they reconciled their accounts without ever touching a coin. We speak today of virtual currencies but the system of pounds-shillings-pence was invented by medieval bankers to come to grips with a huge array a plethora of local coinages whose weights and finenesses changed over time. This was facilitated by a new form of enumeration, so-called Arabic numbers conceptually different from Roman numerals. That system, incidentally, was at first declared unlawful by the very Italian cities whose successes depended on it.

Every civilization has had merchants. The Sumerians had a commercial colony among the Hittites. What made capitalism possible was the invention of the mathematics of risk. Chance became measurable. Predictable outcomes could be monetized and sold in the first stock exchanges. Modern banking and the insurance industry both began in the coffee houses of London. 

Something you are. Mattie Kuhn called herself Ma Kiley for 40 years. She was a boomer, telegrapher who moved from job to job. Much like computer programmers today, and especically considering those times, a large percentage of telegraphers were women who moved from job to job. 

Ma Kiley was a member of two unions, one for railroad telegraphers, the other for telegraphers at banks, hotels, and other businesses. The unions were not recognized by management and owners, of course. But the union members recognized each other, and maintained their solidarity. If a boomer could not afford a railroad ticket, a sympathetic railroad conductor might acknowledge the membership pin worn by union members and find seating for them.

In our time we have other media to carry the same workload of transferring values among people. It can begin with ritual gift exchange, especially for those times when cash would be so awkward.

When thinking about the future, I recommend the works of people who have been proven right over time. It so happens that the free market economists of the Austrian school shared many of the same misconceptions about money presented by Karl Marx. 

Instead, I recommend urbanist Jane Jacobs. She said that the first cities did not evolve from farming villages created when pastoralists settled down. She said that the first cities grew out of camps where hunter gathers met to exchange their surpluses. From those cities, farming expanded outward. The simple fact is that tractors are not manufactured on farms. When crops fail, farmers go hungry but the city just imports food from farther away. She made those and other predictions that were supported by later excavations of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey and other sites. She also said that contrary to Peter Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction” very little is actually destroyed by innovation.

Jacobs pointed out that when steam machinery began to supplant literal horsepower, the craftsmen who had been making brass fittings for horse tack put their lathes and hammers to work turning out fittings for industrial machinery. This was supported 40 years later by George Selgin’s book Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775–1821. So, I assert confidently that as much as the future will bring unpredictable novelties, many of the structures and functions that we have in our social institutions today -especially money- will continue to evolve. 

We will always have coins, notes, and cards. A hundred years from now, people will not be spending uranium coins on the streets of Chicago. But do not be surprised if an asteroid colony begins to issue advertising trinkets made from rhenium, osmium, iridium or whatever it is that they have a lot of and want to sell. Money may take different forms and formats. But we will always have an affinity for tangibles. We already have coins shaped like guitars and baseball gloves. This will only continue. 

Nothing teaches arithmetic like money. Would you rather have two shillings or 25 pence? And if I gave you a shilling five for a box of sweets at a farthing each could I get five dozen or maybe six? In the future, people will do blockchain calculations in their heads, perhaps with the aid of silicon, maybe with enhanced RNA. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Ma Kiley: Railroad Telegrapher 

Objectivism and the Gold Standard 

Mere Gold is Not Enough 

Gresham’s Conjecture 

Supplies and Demands 

At Oryana Co-op I Took my Change in Bay Bucks

Over the weekend of May 18, we were in Traverse City. After shopping on Front Street, we went to Oryana Community Co-op to buy snacks. We were members when we lived in TC. And at that time, I worked with the Bay Bucks planning committee. So, I took my change in community currency. 

Early Stage Concepts

  

A local currency provides an economic “cul-de-sac” that keeps wealth within a community. Local money tends to stay close to home. This means that profits do not get exported via chain stores and multinational corporations. Instead, people buy and sell goods and services among themselves, with the currency being an accounting tool. About 30 towns have tried the experiment, some with more success than others. 

[Portions of this article first appeared in the Michigan State Numismatic Society MichMatist where it can be found online here. ]

Late Stage Concept

10BB Pre-Production Proof 

In the summer of 2003, I heard a radio interview on WIAA-FM, Interlochen, in which two Traverse City community activists, Chris Grobbel and Natasha Lapinski, explained their plans for a hometown money. They sounded competent and intelligent and the project was compelling to me as a numismatist. I tracked them down by asking around at the Oryana Natural Food Co-op. I interviewed them (and others) for an article that ran in the November 13, 2003 issue of Northern Express here. I wrote a follow-up article for the June 9, 2004 issue here. 

For me, the rewards were in managing the design team. I found three design students at Northwestern Michigan College. Brendan O’Brien, Pauline Viall, and Thomas Loomis launched a model company (OVL Design) and signed off on a Statement of Work. I gave them samples of world currencies, a copy of Standish’s The Art of Money and links to websites for the International Banknote Society and the Paper Money Collectors. 

20BB as Pre-Production Proof

Seeking a printer, I found Deep Wood Press and Chad Pastotnik. (There was another alternative but now I cannot find her name.) Chad did everything he could to help them with their insufficient production budget. We abandoned intaglio printing, hemp paper, die cut corners to facilitate telling by touch, and other craft elements. The final version does have a foil security appliqué. Each note was to carry its own motto: “Regional Community Currency” (BB1); “Traverse Area Community Currency” (BB5); “Bread for Your Watershed” (BB10); and “In Community We Trust” (BB20). Instead all of the backs say "Trustworthy Tools for Local Exchange."

Patty Fabian, a designer with Peninsula Partners in Traverse City, developed a set of proposed logos to support the imaging and branding of Bay Bucks in store windows, on bumper stickers, and on the notes themselves.

5BB (Face) and 1BB (Face and Back)

The final version of the series consists of four notes: BB1, BB5, BB10 and BB20. Each represents an eco-system: Dunes (Dune Lily and Piping Plover); Wetland (Morrell Mushroom and Ringtail Raccoon); Farm (Cherry Blossom and Barn Owl); and Forest (Lady Slipper and Whitetail Deer). The Petoskey Stone pattern supplied the border of all four faces.  

The planning committee identified about 100 local businesses that could benefit from participating in “Bay Bucks.”  About 30 of them were considered early adopters. Oryana Community Co-op was central to the success of Bay Bucks. Among the other participants was the State Theatre, home of the Traverse City Film Festival, a joint effort of Michael Moore and the Chamber of Commerce.

RESOURCES AND READING

• Bay Bucks here: http://www.baybucks.org
• Launching Bay Bucks “Local Money Plan for Homegrown Currency has a Rich Past” Northern ExpressNovember 12, 2003, here.
• “Passing the Bay Bucks: Local Currency Could Hit the Streets This Summer,” (Northern Express, 2004) here. 
• Traverse Ticker (2018) “Yes, Traverse City Still has its own Currency” here.
• Traverse Ticker (2019) “Could Bay Bucks go Digital?” here: 
• “I Took My Change in Bay Bucks” on CoinTalk here.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Purse of Eratosthenes 

Money Without Banks and Governments 

Coffee at the Co-op: Tradition and Novelty

Mere Gold is not enough: Hayek’s “Denationalization of Money” 
Awesome Austin Foods at teh Wheatsville Co-op

Robert Leonard's "Curious Currency"

I was disappointed not to see an advance in the scholarship since the first edition of 2010. Make no mistake: this little book is very scholarly. An impressive 495 footnotes support the 126 octavo pages of text and about 250 illustrations (some are composites). But we all have our passions and prejudices. 

I am passionate about the research of Denise Schmandt-Besserat which tied the origins of writing and the invention of numbers greater than three to the creation of clay tokens in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East circa 7500 BCE. Though not traded as money or gifts, the tokens served an economic purpose: they recorded debts. 

Curious Currency: The Story of Money
from the Stone Age to the Internet Age;
2^ndEdition by Robert D. Leonard, Jr.;
Whitman Publishing, 2019;
153+vi pages; $16.95.

That reinforced my prejudice for the research of David Graeber. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011) completely overturned our common imaginings about the origins of money. Those airy theories were shared by both Karl Marx and Ludwig von Mises. Marx at least relied on the best scholarship of his day. Mises just ignored the facts.

Trade did not originate with economic calculations of surplus. Money did not originate with trade for profit. Money did not evolve from barter. Coins did not evolve from money. 

Trade began as ritual gift exchange. Often it was the giving of a tangible to acknowledge an intangible based on social status. No example is known of a society that moved from barter to money, but many examples show that barter is what people resort to when money fails. Money as we understand it began with the payments of debts for torts. Coins began as honorary awards. Robert Leonard’s rich monograph supports those assertions. I am only sorry that he did not make them explicitly. 

I believe that Chapter 1, “What is Money?” is contradicted by the text. Leonard writes: “In simplest terms money is ‘anything used to make a payment that the recipient trusts can be reused to make another payment.’ This includes items used as money only for special purposes or situations, such as bride-price, funeral offerings, heiliges geld (offerings made to propitiate deities), trading with Westerners, or usage only by native chiefs. Among those bride-price is payment made to the bride’s parents as compensation for their loss of her valuable work services.” (Page 2) 

Obviously, of the items listed, none is an example of any expectation of further exchange. Bride-price is a case in point. The material offering only completed the social bonding of the families by the marriage. Calculating the labor of the bride eventually evolved thousands of generations later and in only in some places and times, not universally. Of course, the complement of bride-price is dowry. If bride-price is meant to be the result of an economic calculation that is carried out in money objects, what moneys are accepted as dowry; and if her labor is valuable, why is dowry being offered? Clearly, the complicated social context explains what appears to be a mere financial transaction. 

I also believe we all use the word “money” too readily to mean things that are not money. By analogy, I point to our confused speech about power, energy, and work, or velocity and speed. Generally, no harm is done, but physicists are not so casual. And as numismatists, we should communicate clearly about money, currency, and exchange.  Perhaps numismatists should convene an online standards committee to define our terms.

For a small book, Curious Currency delivers a lot to think about. We easily call it “coin collecting” even though numismatics is the art and science that studies all of the forms and uses of money. This dense little book is about the forms that “money” (exchange objects, ritual gifts) has taken over the thousands of years of human society. Of necessity, this is a broad topic, potentially encyclopedic in scope. Robert Leonard makes the information load manageable by wrapping the stories and narratives into convenient chapters based on those broad themes. 

After an introductory overview, the chapter titles are Raw Materials, Useful Articles, Ornaments, Customary Objects, and Money Substitutes. Coins fall under “raw materials” because they were valued as metal. But silver, gold, copper, bronze, and iron must take their place alongside obsidian and flint which also were money. Coins also appear under “customary objects” along with elephant tails, woodpecker scalps, and human skulls. 

Whiskey, tobacco, tea, cocaine, and postage stamps are considered “useful articles.” Beads of coral, jade, glass, clam shells, cowry shells, silver, and turquoise, arm rings, neck rings, anklets, and many kinds of necklaces are “ornaments” of course. 

That almost anything can be used as money underscores the broad extent of society and culture. Therefore, it may be perfectly fine that the book closes with examples of “nothing” as money. RFID transceiver chips that you wave at a gasoline pump, cellphones as proxies, and cybernetic cryptocurrencies bring the reader near to—but not at—the end of the story of money. 

Overall Curious Currencyis an excellent treatment of a complex and difficult subject. The book is easy to read and worth every minute. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Acccounting for Civilization 

Debt: the Seed of Civilization 

Numismatics Informs Economics 

Numismatics: the Standard of Proof in Economics 

Supplies and Demands 

Spanish Coins on American Notes

Until 1857, silver and gold coins from Mexico, Spain, France, Brazil, and other nations were legal tender in the United States. We know commonly that that US dollar was modeled directly on the "Spanish milled dollar" or "pieces of eight." However, the influence of international trade on the new republic was very deep and broad.

http://scoan.oldnote.org/

The website linked at left is replete with examples of private banks from the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s that issued paper money promising American federal dollars (most often, fractions, actually) but showing Mexican or Spanish coins as graphic images. 

We still sometimes call a 25-cent quarter dollar coin "two bits."  Two hundred years ago, one bit was was one Spanish real. Eight reales made a Spanish dollar. When I was in high school in the 1960s, it was a known cheer: "Two bits, four bits, six bits a dollar. All for [our side] stand up and holler." Spanish Mexican culture continued in the West, of course. You can find The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso by Mike Cox (Tom Doherty Associates, 2009). The 5-peso dollar-sized coin of the United Mexican States of 1947 was a much later version of the Spanish dollar and the Republic of Mexico "Cap and Rays" silver 8-reales (1825-1897).

Thames Bank of Laurel, Indiana, 1856, promises Two Dollars
and shows two Mexican 8-reales

The website Spanish Coins on American Notes lists two dozen examples from twelve states. Most of them were "wildcat" banks from the era of unregulated banking. State regulation was no more successful than the constraints of market competition. Even numismatists look askance at that period of rampant laissez faire. A more objective appraisal would put banking in with other businesses. In the frontier era, economies were shaky at best. People enjoyed a lot of opportunity, but few guarantees. We think of "ghost towns" as a consequence of mining in the West, but Michigan has many from the lumber industry, as well from copper mining.

It is also true that along the eastern seaboard, where trade with the United Kingdom dominated, merchants often kept their books in pounds/shllings/pence into the 1830s. The florin and crown coins of the UK were their attempt to bring their currency into some accord with the dollar. Meanwhile the 4-dollar "Stella" gold coin of the United States was our attempt to align with the 20-franc gold coins of France and other nations.

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