Fig. 32
Mutilated coin look-alikes and one real coin. When I spotted the authentic and heavily damaged beauty sitting underneath a small foreign coin on the exterior ledge of a cash register at the Mulberry Meat Market in Manhattan’s Chinatown, I offered to buy it for face value. The cashier, befuddled by my request, was at first silent. Then she smirked and asked $10 for it. I stood firm. She checked with a colleague, got the OK, and a trade was effected for face value.
Love tokens: Nineteenth-century art pieces made by smoothing out and engraving coins with ornate monograms and romantic imagery. Men typically had these made at country fairs for their girlfriends.
Lucky money: People write notes on gift money, and businesses prominently display money inscribed by friends and colleagues.
Magic money: Magicians alter coins and bills to wow audiences. {Fig. 33}
Fig. 33
The US Bureau of Engraving sells uncut sheets of currency, with which magicians and others can make props like this.
Melting: Fluctuations in the international metal markets means that the worth of a coin’s metal(s) can exceed its face value. One wealthy Texas investor is stockpiling twenty million nickels ($1 million). At the time of his purchase, the metal each nickel is made out of was worth 6.8 cents, but US Mint regulations forbid melting coins, so will he ever be able to legally capitalize on this differential? It is also illegal to carry certain amounts of particular coins out of the United States, and you can be jailed, for instance, if customs agents find you have ulterior motives for crossing international borders with as little as five dollars in pennies and nickels!
Natural forces: Geological and meteorological forces such as fire, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes can wreak havoc with money, as can the slow and steady forces of wind, water, sand, and time.9 These two Hurricane Sandy–flooded quarters come from rolls of change that were drying out over the toaster at Beach Bagel on 129th Street in Rockaway Park, New York, on its first day open after the storm. {Fig. 34}
Fig. 34
Two quarters salvaged from Hurricane Sandy floodwaters, the Rockaway Peninsula, New York, November 28, 2012
Neutron irradiation: Several varieties of irradiated coins have been produced as novelty souvenirs over the years. One such souvenir came from the 1964–65 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, New York. {Fig. 35}
Fig. 35
Souvenir of the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair: a neutron-irradiated dime from the Atomic Energy Commission’s Atomsville, U.S.A., a children’s exhibit about nuclear energy
Novelties: Money can be turned into lucky charms, coins in a bottle, et cetera. Coins can also be hollowed out and made into secret capsules.
Organic substances: Acids, bacteria, bodily excretions and secretions, chemicals, chlorine, dampness, dirt, dyes, grease, gum, humidity, iron oxide, iron sulfide, mold, oil, rust, salt, sap, smoke, soil, soot, tar, and water can damage money. Numismatists are careful when talking around collectible money, as saliva can be corrosive.
Perfins: Punched perforated initials. {see Fig. 31}
Piercing: (also known as holing). Pierced coins are popular jewelry adornments. Hoodoo practitioners puncture silver dimes—to wear them around the neck or ankle as talismans. In related traditions, sigils (magic signs) are written on currency to turn it into “trained hunting money.” In a dentistry district in Kathmandu, Nepal, people hoping for painless treatment nail coins into Vaisha Dev, the Toothache Tree. This orange plastic–spiked penny was nail-gunned into a concrete floor in performance artist Rumiko Tsuda’s 1988 Art Ceremony. {Fig. 36}
Fig. 36
Making jewelry seems to be the primary reason people pierce coins.
Plugging: Filling in a hole in a coin with metal. A coin with a filled hole or holes is called a plug. This is the origin of the expression “not worth a plug nickel.”
Pop-outs: Coins with high-relief portraits that rise well above their rims were a patented invention introduced at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and promoted again in the 1960s.
Potty coins: It was common for nineteenth-century jokers to carve images of toilets into coins bearing the image of a seated Lady Liberty.
Punching: See perfins.
RTM: An acronym for “return to me,” sometimes seen on currency.
Rubber-stamping: One of the most common ways to use currency as a messenger is to rubber-stamp banknotes. This inexpensive means of publishing can reach a broad public. One often-spotted rubber-stamping directs people to the crowd-sourced bill-tracking website http://www.wheresgeorge.com.
Shrinking: The cloth used to make US banknotes can be shrunk. Artists using a proprietary heat and water process created a bill I purchased at the Whitney Museum of American Art gift shop in 1997. {Fig. 37} The shrunken single is thicker and stiffer than standard dollars, but, like all US banknotes, it still weighs exactly one gram. Alas, I failed to record the artists’ names, and the Whitney’s archive has no information. Coins can also be shrunk via elaborate processes; see http://www.capturedlightning.com/frames/shrinkergallery.html.
Fig. 37
When shrunk, this one-dollar note became thicker than a standard dollar.
Silk-screening: Messages and images can be silk-screen printed onto money. {Fig. 38}
Fig. 38
Silk-screened quarters are a less-common alternative to baseball cards. ©Merrickmint.com
Smoothing: Age, use, and abuse can all conspire to smooth out a coin’s relief. {Fig. 39}
Fig. 39
Beautifully smoothed nickel found in pocket change by the artist Dolores Zorreguieta
Soldering: This scarred, solder-splattered penny is one of only four or five coins I have intentionally mutilated. {Fig. 40} In seventh-grade shop class I experimented with tin snips but could not cut through this penny and eventually melted solder onto it. The others were hack-sawed roughly in half so I could inspect their interiors.
Fig. 40
My seventh-grade shop-class experiment
Specimen bills: The word specimen is stamped vertically in red capital letters on examples of banknotes the Federal Reserve sends as reference tools to banks around the world. Specimen bills are not legal tender.
Spooned edges: Sailors were known to while away time by hammering with the heel of a spoon on the edge of a coin to thicken it. They would then hollow out the centers of the coins and fashion rings for missed loved ones.
Stitching: People use a variety of methods to rejoin torn and heavily-worn bills. Clear tape is used a lot today but when Ben Franklin–designed banknotes were circulating people added cloth or paper backings and/ or sewed the bills back together. Several such repaired banknotes are on display at the Newman Money Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Street scraping: Coins can have strata exposed or be otherwise damaged when dragged along streets by motor vehicles. {Fig. 41}
Fig. 41
The various insults and injuries, striations, nicks, cuts, dents, and scratches these coins bear indicate they were dragged along pavement by motor vehicles. The cladding on the lower half of the quarter at the bottom has been entirely scuffed off.
Stretching: I have never seen a stretched bill but presume someone knows how to elongate banknotes. See elongated cents.
Submersion: Coral, crystals, and rust can grow on coins that have been submerged underwater.10 Bronze, copper, nickel, and zinc coins can be destroyed in ocean waters, as can banknotes, but silver and gold coins can survive encrustation and concretions mostly unscathed if they are of high enough fineness.
Swallowing: Money retrieved from the body cavities of people or animals (live or dead) is often found to be mutilated; blood, urine, feces, and other bodily matter can also damage money.
Synthetic materials: Adhesives, bleach, chewing gum, dye, gasoline, glue, ink, metal plating, oil, paint, stickers, tape, et cetera, can alter money.
Variety collectors: A subset of numismatists specializing
in the minute details that differentiate what most people see as ordinary multiples. Self-identified variety collectors specialize in coins that leave the mint with mistakes or anomalies such as off-center imagery or matte finishes (which are supposed to be reserved for specimen coins only). Several groups of variety collectors have banded together to form a society called the Combined Organizations of Numismatic Error Collectors of America. The group’s website features a fiendishly detailed online glossary of terms such as “spiked heads” (when a cracked die leaves a ragged line through the head of a portrait bust on a coin); “pileups” (when coins get caught in the mint’s machinery and fuse together); and “die clashes” (when the die for one side of the coin strikes so hard it leaves an impression on the other side). Variety experts can even identify tiny impressions such as those made by infinitesimal pieces of lint residue from the cloths used to polish coin-making dies.
Vegas coins: A nickname for coins heavily worn by use in slot machines.
Virtual currency: Bitcoin, Krugercoin, Megacoin, Peercoin, Zeuscoin, and other cryptocurrencies can be digitally mutilated. The physical tokens of such peer-to-peer digital currencies are subject to any real-world mutilation possibilities.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Michael S. Shutty Jr., One Coin Is Never Enough: Why and How We Collect (Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 2011), 84.
2. Charles E. Anthon, American Journal of Numismatics and Bulletin of the American Numismatic and Archaeological Society II (June 1867): 3.
3. Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 1.
4. Unless otherwise specified, all money and authorities discussed in this book are from the United States of America.
5. Mark Wagner, email to author, August 14, 2013.
UP LIKE A BAD PENNY
1. Clarence H. Vanselow and Sherri R. Forrester, “Shell Thickness of the Copper-Clad Cent,” Journal of Chemical Education 70 (1993): 1023. The proportion of different metals used in coin making varies from year to year, but in general, of current US coins, cents have the least amount of copper (2.5 percent). Nickels are made of 75 percent copper; dimes, quarters, and halves of 91.67 percent copper; and Susan B. Anthony dollars of 87.5 percent copper.
2. Many of these early uses of copper cents were collected by Jason Goodwin in his book Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 126–27.
3. David Margolick’s paean to pennies (“Penny Foolish,” New York Times, February 11, 2007) details the sensation: “The Washington Star compared the hordes outside the Mint there to the crowds watching the Wright brothers test their ‘aeroplanes.’” Putting Lincoln’s portrait on the penny, Margolick concludes, “was a revolutionary act: Up to then, the only figures on everyday American coins were allegorical figures, like Liberty. Putting real people on them, the thinking went, smacked of monarchy; even George Washington hadn’t rated such treatment. To place Lincoln on the most widely circulated coin made sense; it was Lincoln, after all, who’d said that ‘Common-looking people are the best in the world; that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.’”
4. Including a counter-stamped 1840 cent (see Figure 27).
5. William H. Sheldon, MD, with the collaboration of Dorothy I. Pascal and Walter Breen, Penny Whimsy: A Revision of Early American Cents, 1793–1814: An Exercise in Descriptive Classification with Tables of Rarity and Value (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 6.
6. An organization called Americans for Common Cents (http://www.pennies.org/) advocates for the penny.
7. Website of the United States Mint, http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/fun_facts/?action=fun_facts10.
8. If, when you insert a penny headfirst into an automobile tire tread, the groove does not cover any portion of Lincoln’s head, which is one-sixteenth of an inch from the rim, the tire lacks the requisite traction for safe driving.
SNEAK THIEVES
1. Sir John Craig, Newton at the Mint (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1946), 112.
2. It is easier to spot clipping and shaving if the coins are round to begin with. I asked Michael Pfefferkorn, a builder of several numismatic libraries, what I thought was a simple question: “Who made the first truly round coins?” His reply was staggering: “The problem lies in establishing a definition for the word round. If you examine the Aes Grave (third-century BCE cast bronze) coinage of Rome and the second-century BCE cast Chinese coinage, you will find round coins. The same can be said for fourth-century CE Roman copper, medieval English, Scottish, French, Italian, and others. Admittedly, some coins were badly struck and, as a result, have split or broadened edges. You need to consult [John S.] Davenport’s series of books on German thalers. Another problem is the Hapsburg use of roller dies for mass production, which caused curvature and elongation of otherwise round planchets [pieces of metal readied for stamping into coins]. This is particularly noticeable in lower-denomination silver coins. I believe what you’re looking for is absolute symmetry. Milled coinage (reeded edges) was indeed developed by Isaac Newton. There are several different kinds of edge modifications of which you should be aware. These include the normal reeded-edge coins we use today, the tulip edge [designs resembling tulips used to deter clipping] on Spanish Colonial silver after the demise of cob coinage [coins hastily cut from bars of metal, resulting in more irregular coins than those made with planchets], and the lettered edge [coins] used in France and Italy. One way to approach this is to do it backwards. That is to say, instead of measuring for symmetry, measure for asymmetry. You then need to examine methods of manufacture for the coins in your study. Be careful not to overreach or you will finish your research in 3013! For the average person to understand what you are doing, you need to be mathematically clear in your determination of what is round and what is not, with the understanding that we see shapes in visual form but not mathematical form.” Michael Pfefferkorn, email to author, September 13, 2013.
3. Peter Ackroyd, Newton (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2008), ebook, chap. 13.
4. “The Star and the Black Hole,” The Numismatist (June 2001): 647–48.
FINE LINE
1. Alfred Frankenstein, After the Hunt: William Harnett and Other American Still Life Painters, 1870–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 82. For other early examples of paintings of money, see the essay by Bruce W. Chambers in Old Money: American Trompe l’Oeil Images of Currency (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1988).
2. Ellen Wardwell Lee, Anne Robinson, and Alexandra Bonfante-Warren, Indianapolis Museum of Art: Highlights of the Collection (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2005), 138.
3. Frankenstein, After the Hunt, 151.
4. Mark Wagner, “Why Money?” in exhibition catalog Money, Power, Sex & Mark Wagner (New York: Pavel Zoubok Gallery, 2013), 15.
5. Ibid., 17. A video of currency collage artist Mark Wagner at work is online at http://www.vimeo.com/79148964 (accessed July 15, 2014).
6. Posting by Adamandia Kapsalais on Facebook, January 22, 2011, accessed July 2, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/adamandia.kapsalis/media_set?set=a.1382079108540.2047440.1128831708&type=1&comment_id=837354&offset=0&total_comments=40.
7. It is legal for the public to make local banknotes (such as Ithaca Hours and Berkshire Bucks), but minting metal coins is forbidden. See Bernard von NotHaus’s Liberty Dollars: http://www.fbi.gov/charlotte/press-releases/2011/defendant-convicted-of-minting-his-own-currency. The origins of the piggy bank are probably related to the medieval English word pygg, the term for clay used in the Middle Ages.
8. As stated in the certificate of authenticity accompanying the artwork, dated February 1, 2003, New York, New York, and signed by the artist and a gallery representative.
9. Gülşen Çalık, email to author, August 16, 2013.
CASE NO. 6-02848
1. “Titus, son of the Roman emperor Vespasian, had criticized a
tax on public lavatories. Vespasian held a coin from the first payment to his son’s nose and asked whether the smell was offensive. Titus said no. Vespasian replied, ‘And yet it comes from urine’ (Suetonius, Vespasian xxiii).” John Simpson and Jennifer Speake, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, 5th ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), online edition.
2. Lydia Washington (public affairs specialist, BEP Office of External Relations), email to author, August 8, 2013.
3. Del Quentin Wilber, “Ruined U.S. Cash Worth Millions, but Stories are Priceless,” Washington Post, October 5, 2009.
4. Opus 129, G major. The title for this piece may have been provided by Beethoven’s friend Anton Schindler.
5. Department of the Treasury, letter to author, March 7, 1996.
6. Redeeming damaged money in the nineteenth century must have been a tricky task. Here’s just a snippet of the 1877 Treasury regulations: “Entire pieces, constituting half or more than half, but less than three-fifths of notes, will be redeemed for but half of the full face value of the notes, except when accompanied by an affidavit made in conformity to paragraph 1.” Today’s terms are significantly more refined.
7. Department of the Treasury, letter to author, March 7, 1996.
8. Lydia Washington, email to author, October 7, 2013.
9. Paul Gilkes, “Mint adopts Mutilated Coin Redemption Program changes,” Coin World, September 16, 2011, accessed July 3, 2014, http://www.coinworld.com/numismatic/coins/us-modern/mint-adopts-mutilated-coin-redemption-program.html.
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