Saor Alba

Horses:

A beehive and an elephant.

One of the gruesomest vignettes I have ever seen on paper money, a slaughterhouse:

Yes, Vittorio Emannuel was the King of Italy until 1946, and he was on the larger denomination coins - sometimes in a military helmet. BTW some dictators didn't put themselves on currency, Anastasio Somoza Garcia was the dictator of Nicaragua from the 1930's until his death in 1956, curiously his daughter was on the Nicaraguan Cordoba until 1960:

Of all of them Pol Pot has the unique distinction of outlawing all forms of money - so putting his ugly mug on money would have been a mute point anyway.

Nicolae the Impaler was too ugly to make his mark on money - and too busy building monomaniacal palaces in Bucharest. He didn't even have a whole lot of statues like most dictators. He sure did his best to try to destroy a wonderful people and country.

Three dimes and a cent, not in the reject slot, but under the front of the machine.

It is interesting that Stalin never had his image on money, given that he largely downplayed Lenin after he firmly established his control after the purges in 1937-8. Of course he was not an attractive person - and he knew it.

Fidel Castro is the only one, and only in a small vignette on the reverse of the old 1 Peso note from the 1980's where he was depicted from his entrance into Havana in 1959 in a jeep. Chairman Mao is on all current Chinese banknotes, as Kim Il Sung is on all current and many former North Korean banknotes. Saddam Hussein was infamously depicted on Iraqi banknotes.

Yep, and in the USA they become - "too big to fail"

Mercantile Bank was a much smaller bank, and had far fewer banknotes in circulation - which is regrettable for collectors - because they are wonderfully designed and in deep deep red: Notes were last issued dated 1974, the bank was sold to Citibank in 1984 and the name disappeared. Subsequently the assets of the bank were sold to Bank of Tokyo - Mitsubishi in 1987 and the bank completely disappeared.

First unusual find in awhile, a rolled cent with a dinosaur on it from a museum in Lansing MI.

The significance of the B&W note is that it represents one of the last "souvenirs" from this printer, and their usual exquisite work. The Harrison's note is fantastic, being an admirer of Isambard Kingdom Brunel is a definite plus, he was a fantastic road and marine entrepreneur - the likes of which stands at the apex of amazing 19th century British industrialists, and worthy of a circulating medium beyond a commemorative - and more the likes of a circulating medium.

the design of this banknote was done by the printer, Orell Fussli, a firm founded in 1519 by Christoph Froschauer. The feminine vignette is known as Helvetia and her image is borrowed from the gold 20 CHF coin. This design caused a bit of a stir when it was released, because well, Helvetia is rather voluptuous and healthy. This banknote represents some of the finest of printing technology available in the 1920's by a printer that is still one of the leaders in secure banknote printing today.

I have an entry for 1569, but nothing for 1570 that I can remember anyway.

11 cents, one dime and a zincoln.

Tres bonne Monsieur, cette belle! I love red, and early De La Rue notes.

Yes! A nice early Rhodesian Pound note from the commercial banking era on it's way along with something early from Scotland too.

An amazing note, and no small challenge to find such a nice example of as I am finding with African notes. One unfortunate thing I have noticed with several of the French West Africa and Belgian Congo notes is that you can identify characterisations on the notes, particularly beginning in the 1930's and through the 1950's that would cause an uproar these days. That fact alone makes these highly collectable as testaments to a brutal colonial era.

Ooo la la, oui, cette tres belle!

The first vignette on the left of the note is rather famous in Mexican banknote collecting annals, La Siesta is the title of this work that graced the $50 denomination for this bank. High grade, issued, banknotes from this era of Mexico are difficult to find as they were called in and redeemed when Banco de Mexico became the sole issuer of paper money in the 1920's. As with most Mexican banknotes this note portrays lovely colouring coupled with deeply embossed engravings - in this case proprietary images to Banco Nacional. The lady on the right of the note appeared on all denominations from this bank.

This note has a stirringly mysterious vignette of a peasant with bundled sheaves of wheat in the background, rather haunting and ironic in effect. In reality the Germans managed to pillage most of the grain grown in Ukraine during their occupation and very little actually went to the local population. When the Germans overran Ukraine they imposed a whole new monetary system on the country, the USSR rubles were removed from circulation at a rate of 1:1 vs the karbovnets denominated currency that they issued. The karbovnets was valued at 10:1 to the German Reichsmark. Curiously, but tellingly the Germans issued this currency with only a small amount of Ukrainian langauge text - on the bottom reverse of the note - in effect letting the Ukrainians know where they stood in the situation. The first notes prepared had all of the text in Ukrainian, but they were rejected by the German run "Central Emission Bank". One wonders why they even bothered denominating the currency in a name familiar to Ukrainians, they might just as well as referred to the new currency as marks given the presence of mostly German language on the notes.

Does make for nice collectable conversation pieces if you can want to have that $10000 from Brunei on it. I wonder that the Sultan has most of them in his personal collection?