|
|
People collect coins for different reasons. For some, the motivation may
be filling holes in an album, finding rare varieties, or amassing a huge number of coins. For me, it's the coin's
eye appeal. The pinnacle of coin appreciation, in my unopinionated opinion, is the glom. You seize upon an amazing
coin with your eyes and stare away. One way to describe this is coin connoisseurship.
On one level, you inspect the physicality of the coin, marveling at the beauty of its design, strike, and state
of preservation, following the coin's lines and curves, its raised devices and depressed fields, tilting the coin
for different perspectives, watching the light reveal its wonders. On another level, you look through the coin
at its background and history, the story it tells about itself, its age, and the people who bought and sold with
it, people who may be very much alike you and me in some ways, very much different in other ways.
Like perhaps no other objects, coins have a yin-yangy duality. They pair the commercial with the artistic, the
crass with the ethereal, the mundane with the transcendent, the present with the past, the mass produced with the
unique. When glomming a beautiful historical coin, the awe can be overpowering. These pieces of monetary metal,
through their beauty and history, can transcend mere materialism.
At its highest level, I believe, coin appreciation can be spiritual. Coins aren't different from any other object
in this sense. Anything that can focus the concentration can be used in this way, but if the object has transcendent
value, as do some coins, it exercises both the spiritual and the intellectual mind.
Coins, anchored in time, can be timeless. Glomming a coin can stop time, which in a psychologically real way, can
make you immortal.
Much of the eye appeal of a particular coin type of course is subjective. What follows are Web pages of mine about
history's most glomworthy coins, to my eyes, both modern and ancient. World, medieval, and other coins aren't represented
below but will be in the future.
The selections below lean heavily toward ancient Greek coins. From perusing images of history's coinage from various
sources, I'm not alone in regarding the coins of the ancient Greeks as both the most important and impressive of
all time. The Greeks, more than any other people, were responsible for the spread of coinage as an economic and
political institution (not to mention democracy and science), and their numismatic output as a whole represents
its aesthetic zenith.
Lions: The First Coin
Athenian Owl: The Most Important
Coin
Alexander the Great: The
Most Powerful Coins
Medusa: The Ugliest Woman on
a Coin
Thracian Tets: The Most
Abstract Coin
House of Constantine: The
Most Historic Coin Series
Draped
Busts: The Most Beautiful Woman on a Coin
The Saint: The Most Beautiful
Coin
The Most Foreign Coins (coming)
The Most Horrific Coin (coming)
The Most Menacing Coin (coming)
The Most Mysterious Coin (coming)
The Ugliest Man on a Coin (coming)
The Most Handsome Man on a Coin (coming)
The Most Powerful Coins - Part Two (coming)
The Most Sunken Coins (coming)
The Most Widely Collected Coins (coming)
|
|
