US Paper Money
Funny Money: When Mangled Coins and Defaced Currency Become Works of Art
By Ben Marks — Harley J. Spiller is one of the most voracious collectors in the United States, but you won’t find him wandering around the tony galleries of Christie’s in New York or tromping through the antiques-strewn fields of Brimfield, Massachusetts. That’s because Spiller collects things like seashells, bottle caps, Chinese menus, paperclips, photographs of corn, and "furcula," which most of us know as wishbones. Spiller has around 80 collections of such modest objects, which are usually easier to...
Foreign Coins of the U.S. Founding Fathers
By Maribeth Keane and Brad Quinn — I started collecting coins at age 11 when I earned a Boy Scout Coin Collecting Merit Badge. I collected cents, nickels, and dimes, placing them in the blue Whitman folders. Like most other boys in the late ’60s, I got interested in girls and cars, and then I went to college. I had been married for a few years before I dusted off my Whitman folders and tried to fill in the remaining holes, like the 1909-S V.D.B. cent, the 1914-D cent, and the 1955 Double Die cent. After completing my Lincoln...
An Interview with Smithsonian Coin and Currency Curator Richard Doty
By Maribeth Keane and Ben Marks — When I was 8 years old I had a friend named Jimmy Hood. His father was in the army, and he had been on the staff with General MacArthur when MacArthur was effectively the boss of Japan right after World War II. Jimmy had some Japanese and Chinese coins, so we swapped a few things, as kids will do. And at that point, in 1950, I just got hooked on coins. I also had some paper currency when I was a kid, thanks to a friend who had been in the Flying Tigers. He brought back some Indian rupees...
Tony Swicer Explains How He Started Collecting Kentucky Bank Notes
By Maribeth Keane and Anne Galloway — I started collecting when I was about 10 years old. My father was in the Air Force, so he got me started collecting everything—coins, stamps, military insignias, baseball cards, all kinds of stuff. I settled on coins, maybe because they’re worth the most money. I don’t know why particularly, but I just did. I collected coins from probably 1959 to the late ’70s when I sold my collection. I collected dollar-size metals for 10 years, and I sold that collection in about 1990. Then I...