I don't often buy coins off of
ebay, but $25 shipped seemed like an OK deal - usually,
ebay shipping costs to Canada are astoundingly awful. Come on, Americans, Canada is a first world country too... no reason to charge like $15 for tracked first-class post...
Anyway, this 10-balboa (which is pegged in value at 1:1 to the U.S. dollar) coin is made of nickel, which is kinda rare - most high-value commemoratives are silver proofs. Even stranger, this non-circulating issue had a huge mintage of 300,000.
Panama is an area of personal interest for me, and so I already have some coins that commemorate similar things. This one is for the Ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty between the two presidents Jimmy Carter and Omar Torrijos - it was negotiated that in 1999, almost 100 years after it was built, Panama's most valuable asset would finally be owned by the country it was named after. I also have a 1-balboa coin featuring President Torrijos on it.
Panama made the mistake of signing over some of its minting rights to the Franklin Mint, which has an unfortunate habit of creating coin denominations that nobody will ever need just to put in proof sets. The Franklin Mint also liked to create proof set coins with different designs than their circulating counterparts, many of which are available for extremely cheap ($2 each or less).
This coin appeals to me for one more reason - it's a coin with a map on it! A set of "geographical coins" would be very interesting to complete - many troubled countries, lacking symbols of political unity, resort to one completely non-partisan symbol - their outline on a map. The map can also be used to assert claims over disputed territory. So you can see maps on the coins of war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, maps including the disputed Jammu and Kashmir on India, maps of the Falkland Islands on a certain Argentine commemorative, and so on. There are also stylized maps chosen for artistic appeal - for instance, the monometallic French 10-franc coin features a stylized depiction of France, and some Brazilian coins feature a very nice topographical map of the "Gift of the
Amazon". One day I'll try getting all of my map coins together and posting them.
Posted 09/07/2014 9:09 pm
