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Coin Shop Lottery: Collector explores interesting purchases

In a new monthly column making its debut in the April 22 issue of Coin World, “Coin Shop Lottery,” collector Thomas Cohn will examine his recent purchases for $50 or less, since each items has an interesting story to tell.

In the inaugural column, he explores a low-condition and canceled Continental currency note acquired for a small sum at his local coin shop. In researching the piece, Thomas discovers that is not a genuine note issued by the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War, but a counterfeit issued by the British government in an act of attempted economic sabotage. The condition of the shows that it circulated widely and was ultimately removed from circulation and canceled.

Each month, Thomas will explore other purchases that speak to him as a collector. Be sure to read his column, exclusive to the print and digital editions of Coin World.

Readers Ask: Altered coin, to the moon

My “Readers Ask” column in the April 22 issue features questions from two readers, one with a coin the owner thought might be an error, and the other with a miniature medal containing silver that flew into space, all the way to the moon.

The coin is an altered Jefferson 5-cent coin that was stacked with a Lincoln cent, and then pressure was applied to the stack. The result was what error experts call a “sandwich job” — a form of alteration in which one or both of the coins in the stack bear design elements impressed from the other coin.

The small medal, promoted as a “mini coin” when it was issued nearly 50 years ago, contains silver that was flown aboard Apollo 14, the third mission to land astronauts on the moon. Despite the historic nature of the piece, the medal remains very affordable today.

To learn more about the two pieces, see my column in the latest issue.

Tokens to Collect: Political token from 1790s

Conder tokens are a type of token issued in Britain in the 1790s during a coinage shortage. As Jeff Starck writes in the “Tokens to Collect” column in the April 22 issue of Coin World, these tokens were issued for circulation and to meet demand from contemporary collectors.

The highlighted piece features a theme whose origin lies with attacks on a prominent British citizen whose support for the French and American revolutions triggered violent attacks from fellow residents. The token makes explicit references to riots over the man’s presence.

To read more about this Conder token, read Jeff’s column, found only in the print and digital editions of Coin World.