and I think they are kind of cool...i sold everything else...but kept theses... I'm not a huge world coin person, I only have enough buffer space in my computer for US coinage. I don't know why but these speak to me Thought I'd share.
\Common enough coins but loaded with historical associations. The first reflects the economic chaos following the first World War. France did not suffer as much as Germany but for a country supposedly on the winning side, the population, resources and terrain were pretty beaten up after 4 years of trench warfare. The second is a horrible looking coin and nicely reflects the situation in Holland under Nazi occupation. A dark, gloomy coin, an ugly design and unattractive material. Older coins tend to have a story attached, modern ones just make money for their minters and traders and parasites like grading companies. For the price of having one modern coin graded you could have a mason jar full of coins with enough history and geography to last a lifetime, or more reasonably, a year or two.
awe dangit! I'm horrible at double checking...Lot....not log...lot +1 on that. That is part of the reason I kept them. I also think the Franc has an art deco style inflùence, which caught my eye. that's just not right
I am mostly a collector of 20th century world coins, for some of the reasons others mentioned: affordable, historical, artistically pleasing, etc. I sense some wonderment in your post. Why don't you collect more world coins? Imagine owning an uncirculated French franc like the one you have. What a beauty those coins are. The other coin is in pretty nice shape. I go through s lot of the zinc coins and they tend to all have whitish corrosion/oxidation that wouldn't result in a clean grade I'd imagine. And it's interesting how this zinc coins turn black and look more like they were made from charcoal. I always notice the silvery color on our post-1982 cents that shows through sometimes on our cents. Will this turn black too over the decades? Were these zinc world coins silver colored when first minted and uncirculated? Does anyone know? I'm not too familiar with the metal
