Numismatism!

[altivo]

Coins are funny things. We ascribe value to them mostly by agreement these days, since they rarely have any actual precious metal in them. The circulation manager at work was making up a bank deposit and counting cash yesterday morning. She came to me with half a dozen US dollar coins and asked if I wanted to buy them. I usually buy any she gets in, since Gary likes to use them. So I gave her the equivalent amount in paper currency. Then she asked if I were interested in foreign coins. Apparently she'd been accumulating a pocketful of non-US coinage that had been accepted at the desk by inattentive staff members. I said I didn't think so, but then I got curious and asked to see what she had.

There were quite a few oddities. I asked how much and she said to value them at whatever we probably took them in for. Counting by the size and color, most looked like quarters or pennies, with a couple of nickels and two dimes. Plus one odd Canadian coin that was very tiny, silver and thinner/smaller than today's dime. In the end I took the whole lot for the princely sum of $1.67. When I got it home and looked more closely at what I had, I found that about half of it was Canadian. There were several "elk" (quarter dollars) including two very shiny ones issued in 2005 for Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee year. A "bluenose" dime, named for the sailing ship on the back, some beaver nickels and maple leaf pennies. Then there was that odd tiny coin. It was Canadian, in very good condition, and 121 years old. The portrait was of Queen Victoria, and it was minted in 1880. I had to do some research on that. Turns out these coins were called "fish scales" because they were the size of a codfish scale. In 1880 they were pure Sterling, or .925 pure silver. The tiny thing rings like a little bell when dropped on a hard surface. It may have a collector's value as high as $90, apparently, but I think it's much too pretty to just sell.

There were also some old US pennies, the Lincoln design from 1960 or earlier with the "wheat ears" on the back rather than the picture of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. One rather dirty penny, however, was an Indian head dated 1908. Indian head pennies were last minted in 1909, and were replaced in that year by today's Lincoln design. There was a buffalo nickel, to go with the Indian head I guess.

The rest were various foreign denominations, including a one euro coin from Portugal, a Mexican peso, a Panamanian cent, and an Australian 10 cent piece from 1974. No great rarities, I'm sure, but they were interesting to sort through.

Comments

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

How cool... I love those coin oddities. I hardly ever get any because I don't handle money (except for the usual personal transactions). I ended up with a coin from the Bahamas once, and a small British denomination another time. Wheaties, sure, but never any Indian Heads.

That fish scale is quite the find. Would like to see a photo of that, if you have the inclination to take one.

I found a Canadian quarter last week that commemmorated the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, where Queen Elizabeth shares the obverse with an inukshuk (the symbol of the games).

[altivo]

I'll get a photo for you if my camera can get close enough. It has a macro focus but I'm not sure how close it can go or how good the detail is. The US had somewhat similar coins in the 19th century, before the nickel was introduced. They were called "half-dimes". Most of those are even scarcer. I suspect they tended to get lost because of their tiny size, and the survivors probably got melted for their silver as the value of the metal went higher than the face value of the coin.

Meanwhile, here's an image of some other old coins I have in my desk drawer. These are from Britain, but are probably all of Roman origin. Really too worn and corroded to be sure just what they are, but I'm sure they are nearing 2000 years old.

[hrrunka]

It's strange that such old coins are still circulating. Fascinating stories they might tell.

A while back Kenya had a five shilling piece exactly the same size and weight as the UK fifty pence piece of the time. Around that time I heard a story of one individual getting change in five different currencies from a ticket machine near Heathrow airport.

[altivo]

Sometimes old coins come into circulation when a kid finds them somewhere they were stashed and appropriates them to buy candy or whatever. Usually neither the buyer nor the seller has any idea of the potential worth of 19th century coinage.

Canadian coins circulate pretty freely in some parts of the US, though. When I was growing up in Michigan, no one ever refused them except maybe the bank. Canadian paper was another matter, probably because it comes in so many different colors and looks like Monopoly money beside the drab black and green US currency.

Currently the US Mint has been going crazy with "commemorative" coins, particularly quarters. There are so many different quarter designs in circulation that it's no surprise when a euro or peso shows up in the quarter compartment of the cash drawer.

[frith]

The ungulate on the Canadian quarters is a caribou, not an elk. 8^) I'm looking forward to the picture of the "fish scale". I believe the last year for Canadian silver quarters and dimes was 1968. After that they switched to nickel, and now the dimes are mostly copper, maybe the quarters too. I'd have to look it up.

[altivo]

I'm sure I knew that but it has always been an elk to me.

The US dropped silver out of its coins in the 1960s too. About the same time, the dollar bill changed from being a "silver certificate" representing one dollar's worth of silver held by the US Treasury into a "Federal Reserve Note" representing nothing but a pack of lying, thieving bankers.

I will get a photo of the five cent silver piece, with something to show its minuscule size. Perhaps tomorrow. I'm delayed today by having attended a concert so we could listen to Verdi, Mozart, and Dvorak (inside an evangelical church no less) while the rapture didn't happen.

[hrrunka]

I think the UK dropped silver out of its coins about the same time, though there were a few still in circulation for a while. A strange hang-over from those days was the pricing of things at the transit terminal in Bengazi back in the early 70s. We used to have a stop-over there (an hour for re-fueling, I think) back when I was being flown back to UK for school. All the refreshments were "two bob", and any older shillings and florins didn't go into the change drawer.

[altivo]

That sort of thing was common here for a while too. People had the notion that 1) the silver coins would become incredibly valuable very quickly, and 2) the paper money would somehow become worthless. Neither quite happened.

I remember my grandmother hoarding silver coins. She also hoarded currency issued by the Federal Reserve district of Dallas, Texas. Someone had told her it was valuable and contained secret messages about the Kennedy assassination. At the time it was marked "Series of 1963" and the Federal Reserve of Dallas is represented by a letter "K" in the seal and the serial numbers. She insisted that it was 1963 because that was the year of the assassination, The "K" stood for Kennedy of course. And she kept the bills in a box along with some half dollar coins that had Kennedy's portrait on them. Those were the last silver half dollar coins issued.