Scarinci - Coin of the Year : Celebrating Three Decades of the Best in Coin Design and Craftsmanship

Celebrating Three Decades of the Best in Coin Design and Craftsmanship By Donald Scarinci An award for excellence in coinage design first issued in 1984 by Krause Publications in Iola, Wisconsin, has become the ultimate international recognition of mints and their artists, growing into the communitys most coveted award for contemporary world coins. Today, artists and mints worldwide openly compete for one of the Krause Coin of the Year categories. The announcement of the Coin of the Year is one of the highlights of the annual World Money Fair, and the winner is internationally celebrated. Any remaining mintage of the winner quickly sells out and coin values rise dramatically on the secondary market. This is, indeed, solid evidence of the global acceptance, standing and success of the annual award. The Coin of the Year Award had a humble origin as a pet project of Krause Publications founder Chester Chet Krause and former Krause Publications President and CEO Clifford Cliff Mishler.

By highlighting medallic art with merit, Mishler hoped to encourage world mints to improve the art of coins. Few could have imagined how the brainchild of these two pioneering men would be so well received today. An international panel of judges nominates and votes for coins in each category. Category winners then compete for the grand prizethe Krause Coin of the Year. The first award in 1984 began a tradition of honoring coins that were minted two years prior to the ceremony. Thus, the inaugural Coin of the Year went to the United States Mint for Elizabeth Jones 1982 design of the George Washington Commemorative half dollar.

This inspiring design, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the birth of George Washington, was the first commemorative coin issued in the United States since 1954, when the previous program was suspended. The United States and Canada were the first winners, causing concern that the award would be myopic in focus, gazing only at the design work done in North America. Those fears were set aside when Finland won the award in 1987 for its 1985 design, Kalevala National Epic. This was the first time a coin with what could be considered a modernist design was selected for international recognition by the Krause judges. By 1990, with the Coin of the Year going to Albania for its 1988 dated silver 50-Leke Railroads design, the prestigious award began to gain acceptance as an international award. The 50-Leke is a five-ounce silver round with a piercing that invites the viewer to follow the path of a train as it goes through a tunnel.

With the coins selection, the Krause judges made it clear they viewed coins as three-dimensional objects, not merely pretty pictures on metal. The award to Albania in 1990 validated the Coin of the Year as a truly international award of merit for innovation and artistic excellence in world coins. When the award began, an overall Coin of the Year was selected as well as six category winners: Most Popular; Most Historically Significant; Most Artistic; Best Gold Coin; Best Silver Coin; and Best Crown. Through the years, as the competition evolved, other categories were added and some removed to bring the total number of judged categories to ten. The later categories were: Most Inspirational; Best Contemporary Event (defined as an event within the last 100 years); Most Innovative; Best Bi-Metallic; and Best Circulating. As interest in the Coin of the Year has surged, a fascinating offshoot of the program has emerged collecting the winning coins.

Ive found collecting Coin of the Year coins a rewarding experience. Assembling a collection of the main winners is challenging enough to be fun; but, with the exception of the gold and platinum issues, the winning coins are not excessively expensive to collect. Some have small mintages, but that does not translate into big price tags. Selecting a category like Most Historical, where Krause defines historical as the passage of at least 100 years, is like taking a survey class in world history from the point of view of the coin-issuing country. A coin like the 1986 dated Austria 500-Schilling, commemorating the 500th anniversary of the first dollar with a set of coins from each of the six current mints, is a wonderful gateway to study the origin and history of the dollar denomination around the world. A quick scan of the topics chosen by coin-issuing authorities expands your perception of what a country considers to be its important events, or of its contributions to the world, such as the 1995 German 10 Mark commemorative for the 100th anniversary of the X-ray.

The 2003 Australia silver 10 Dollar Evolution of the Alphabet coin is a fascinating piece and a wonderfully curious subject for that country to choose. A collection of the Most Inspirational would begin with the 1993 Poland 300,000 Zlotych, which marked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The coins that have received this award range from the 1996 Paralympics silver dollar from the United States to the 2006 Pink Ribbon 25-cent coin from the Royal Canadian Mint, struck to raise breast cancer awareness. The Best Contemporary Event category, added in 1996 with the award for the 1994 United Kingdom 50 Pence commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Invasion of Normandy, is a wonderful way to study more modern history. These coins remind us of the ancient Greek and Roman practice of using coins as the newspapers of their day, communicating a message or persuading the public of the benefit of a leader, event or building. A collection of these coins includes subjects ranging from the 1997 South Africa 1 Rand honoring the first heart transplant to the 2000 German 10 Mark celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the German reunification.

These coins are as interesting for their designs as they are for the topics they commemorate. Perhaps my favorite category is Most Innovative. As a group, these coins show the modern history of technological innovations in the process of making coins. The first coin in the Most Innovative category was the 1988 Albania 50 Leke, a large coin commemorating railroads. This large, impressive coin featured a piercing to represent part of a tunnel, a radical departure and advancement of coin design. A collection of these coins shows the evolution of minting technology and the willingness of world mints to experiment.

They include coins on planchets that are not flat, like the 2001 France 1 Franc coin, and coins with non-metallic substances, like the 2009 British Indian Ocean Territorys 2 Pounds Life of the Turtle. A quick scan through the images in this book reveals the richness and diversity of medallic art spanning the last quarter century. In the early 1980s, Cliff Mishler and Chet Krause could not have anticipated that the dramatic embrace of modernism in medallic art that began at the end of WWII would become accepted as the norm on circulating world coin designs. The coins illustrated throughout this book are exceptional examples of the evolution of world coin design and provide a permanent record of the art of coins for this period. Since ancient times, the artisans who created coins used in commerce were artists whose technique was ever evolving, carefully studied and appreciated as much as the monumental works in public squares and buildings. It is well known today that the most widely reproduced works of arts in the world are not housed in museums, but rather sit in the hands of commerce.

Countless millions of Victor David Brenners 1909 depiction of Abraham Lincoln have been appreciated and recognized around the world by countless millions of people. It is not just a coin. It is a work of art. The pages of this book present a contemporary history of the world and a history of contemporary art. Most of the coins remain available and affordable. A collection of coins in any one of the categories makes an attractive visual display, providing hours of fun and learning.