The Best Of My Coin Show Loot

I've just spent three days at the local coin show here in Brisbane; I was one of the volunteers manning the coin club display and the information desk. I still managed to find plenty of time to spend way too much money at the dealer's tables. Here's the best of what I picked up. As usual, they're scans, not photos, so lustre isn't captured well.

By far the most expensive coin I bought was this Belgian Federation florin of 1790. The Belgian Federation was a short-lived revolutionary republic more-or-less corresponding to modern Belgium and Luxembourg. As an example for my OFEC collection, it's somewhat of an overkill; I don't normally buy coins this nice - or this expensive.


I was glad to pick this one up. It's the size of a British shilling, and the obverse is the same as a shilling reverse... but it's from Brunswick-Luneberg, the German state from whence the King Georges came, and at the time still ruled by the British kings as absentee monarchs. It's a 1/6th thaler, as you can see by the tiny "1/6" in the middle of the cross-of-shields. The reverse shows the "Wildman of Brunswick", kind of a German version of Paul Bunyan, commonly featured on coins of the Brunswick houses.


I didn't have any Byzantine gold coins, despite the fact that they're often quite cheap. This one is a gold hyperpyron of Emperor Andronicus II and his son Michael IX, 1295 - 1320 AD. The Empire's sad state of decline is dramatically illustrated by this coin: The "gold" is only 14k or so, and very rosy-coloured. And the siege mentality of this tiny remnant of the Empire is given away by the crude design on the reverse: the Virgin Mary sitting inside the walls of Constantinople. As with most Byzantine gold of the period, the coin is "scyphate", or bowl-shaped: highly concave. Nobody really knows why.


The Indian state of Kutch is one of only a handful of countries to make coins in the name of the "uncrowned king", Edward VIII in 1936. I couldn't pass up this one, which for a piece of Native State silver is in excellent condition. Edward's name is the topmost of the three lines of Arabic running across the pic on the left; the "upside-down V" at top left is Edward's number, "8".


I finally picked up an example of a serrated denarius. These coins were made during the Republic period of Roman coinage, though no-one really knows why they went to all the trouble to manually cut serrations into each blank prior to striking. It may have been a very early attempt at a "security edge", but if so, the number of contemporary counterfeit serrated coins found today indicates it was quite unsuccessful. The Consul named on this coin is Scipio Asiagenus (c. 106 BC), descendant of the famous general Scipio that defeated Hannibal of Carthage.


This little coin is from a country I'd never heard of till I bought it: the Barony of Schonau. This 4 heller is the only coin they ever made; apparently, their neighbours were so outraged that the baron had dared to strike these coins without obtaining the right to do so from the Holy Roman Emperor, that they ganged up on him and invaded.


Finally, this Swedish "emergency daler" is one of a series of copper coins put out in 1718. Sweden had no silver, so these token coins were issued, with the promise to redeem them later for silver. The different obverse designs were intended to be redeemable at different times. These must not have been very popular, because a year later, Sweden began the issue of the famous Plate Money, which gave people a full daler's worth of copper (though not in a particularly convenient form). This coin obviously saw very little circulation, as it's in near-Unc condition.