Among a bunch of really good coins, I picked this up at a coin show yesterday. It's a 1921 Munsterberg 20 Pfennig Brown Porcelain coin in great shape. I have never seen, nor heard of a porcelain coin before. Has anyone else? Any idea as to it's value? I'm not selling it, but as a dropped 13 bucks for it, I'm just wondering if I got taken, or if I should go to this dealers shop, and grab the few others he has. Thanks,
It's a Notgeld (Emergency Money) coin. Not familiar with that specific one, buy $13 seems like a good deal to me. Drusus has some info on his site... http://www.cachecoins.org/notgeldcoins.htm
Japan produced 1, 5 and 10 sen coins in porcelain during the final days of WW II. The 1 sen circulated for a few days in the Tokyo area, but the others are not believed to have circulated at all. Catalog values range from $4 to $325 in Krause. The Japanese Numismatic Dealers Association catalog lists them as patterns, with values ranging from ¥2,000-100,000 (~$17-350).
You paid a fair price for that coin, I see them cheaper and more expensive so...the crossed swords means it was minted by Meissen porcelain works. It might even be a more valuable version of the coin as the detail looks a bit softer and when they started minting these, they started making molds by hand (solfter details) and began later using machine with hard dies which caused them to look much more angular. The brown procelain was minted for circulation, white less so...so that might be the case here...of course the porcelain experiment didnt work as peoples money cracked, they were not happy but they took off as collectors items and were popular in the day...they minted coins and medals in porcelain up until WWII...mostly as novelties. This company still makes porcelain and the crossed swords is considered the oldest trademark in the world. Not long ago they had a showing of the coins they minted on contract to the government... Nice notgeld coin...I love these so if it were me I would grab the others Notgeld still is rather cheap on the whole which is good for cheap collectors...I think that will change... BTW...I just have a small fraction of my notgeld up right now...it just takes a lot of time to do each one.
By the way, Meissen still makes medals. Here is one for the wine fest that ended yesterday: http://www.meissner-weinfest.de/med1_gr.jpg A pretty impressive one was the porcelain medal (Ø 50 mm) that they made during the 2002 flood disaster. It was produced and sold as a fundraiser: http://www.meissen.de/img/hw_medaille.jpg (larger image of the obverse, same as the one "embedded" above) http://www.landscape.de/visagis/visagis_0302/images/zweimed1.jpg (small image, both sides) Christian
yeah, I knew they were still minting medals, they showed some of them at the show...no more coins for circulation though That wine fest medal is very nice...
