Recently I’ve been buying coins from a wonderful coin dealer online. I like his services so much, I wanted to share it with you. Originally he was recommended by my collector friend, Ole Sjoelund. His name is Gundars Sokolovskis, and he is from Latvia.
Gundars sells mostly 20th and 21st century circulation coins, though he also has some commemoratives. At the time of this writing he has about 8000 different kinds of coins, and all are displayed on his web site.
Another numismatic bucket list was checked off when we visited the Hungarian National Museum’s numismatic collection. This time, again, we traveled with the family. I kept putting it off, as I was traveling to Hungary quite often and I thought I’ll always have time for it. I wish I have started with this museum.
Before the trip, I contacted Dr. Csaba Toth, the director of the coin collection to ask him to provide us with a hands-on introduction of the collection. He immediately got back to me, and even though it was at a short notice, offered us a flexible schedule to visit the museum.
Continue reading “Visiting the Hungarian National Museum’s numismatic collection”
The Internet Archive, Archive.org contains almost two million books which are protected, but are freely available for people with print disabilities. Most of these protected books are not available electronically from other places. However, accessing these materials is not immediately obvious. In this post I will describe the problem, and how to get around it.
Though this blog is about coin collecting, this is a topic which can be useful for all people with print disabilities, such as blind, visually impaired or dyslexic. Therefore, I will talk about the issue in general, and at the end I will explain how these protected materials relate to numismatics in general. For the time being, let me just say that it has opened a new world in numismatic research.
Continue reading “Accessing protected DAISY documents on Archive.org”
This year I have attended the World’s Fair of Money for the second time. Again, the main reason was because I submitted a presentation which was accepted. Learning from the previous experience in 2015, I prepared very differently this time.
It has been a busy and interesting year. Quite a bit of travel, great readings and discoveries.
One great aspect of coin collecting is to just sit and ponder about what an old coin was used for when it was in circulation. To me it often more interesting than owning a coin. Of course, it is a little more than pondering. It inspires me to read about history, economy, travel or literature. Sometimes a coin inspires me to read about random loosely connected things for days, one after another. Or, it works the other way around, when I read a book that has currency mentioned I often go out and try to find the coins in question. This is of course, not an original idea. One example is Gerald Tebben’s Coin World article, What did Scrooge use to pay Bob Cratchit?, or the The Fourth Garrideb Club, which studies the coins used in Sherlock Holmes stories.
I am not even trying to compete with that kind of a research, but I found over the years that I was always excited to find old references to currency to understand how money was used and what it was worth. Of course, it only makes sense if it can be established that the information is valid. Partly this is why I mostly rely on travel books, because the money related data will be as valid as anything else, it is only about the credibility of the author.
Continue reading “The price of travel in Brazil in the 1930’s according to Gabor Molnar”
In recent news, we can read that the Reserve Bank of India is soliciting bids from companies to create a mobile app to identify currency to help visually impaired people. Unfortunately, as in most cases, bits and pieces of the news is picked up by online resources, and it is hard to trace it back to the original source. One of the most reliable resource I found was by The Hindu Business Line. This is relevant, because it was only last year that the RBI has started to explore how to make Indian Rupees accessible for the “visually challenged”. So, why is it necessary to create an app, and how will this app help? Before I would answer this question, let’s look at the history of accessible currency in India, because some of the answers go back to almost 20 years.
Continue reading “Will the currency of India be usable for the visually impaired?”
The Central Bank of Kenya announced the redesign of the Kenyan coins at the end of 2018. An interesting component of the announcement was that the new coin designs are to be more accessible for visually impaired people. The announcement circulated on the internet in slightly different variations, both in English and Swahili. Here is an official poster. The major change is that the picture of Jomo Kenyatta is replaced with wild animals, the giraffe, rino, lion and elephant, which can be found in Kenya.
I was anxious to find out in what way will the new coins be more accessible. At the time of the announcement very little information was available. This week finally I have received a set of the new coins. I organized the old and new coins on the pictures so that they can be seen side by side for the sake of comparison.
Continue reading “Kenya makes coins accessible for the visually impaired”
In 2018, Australia hosted the 4th Invictus Games, which is an adaptive sports event for injured armed services personnel. To commemorate the event, the Royal Australian Mint released a circulating 2 Dollar coin together with a colored and a silver commemorative 1 Dollar coin. What’s interesting about the Dollar coin is that with this release, Australia joined the list of a few countries which issued a braille coin.
Braille coins are relatively rare, so I was very interested about what motivated the Royal Australian Mint to release this coin, and what were their possible challenges. I sent an email to the Royal Australian Mint and received a prompt response for my questions, which follows below.
It is not rare to find braille on money. Some coins and paper currencies contain braille writing. Braille is more often associated with paper money, but there are a few examples of braille on coins. There are two primary reasons to put braille on money: to bring awareness to people with visual impairment, or to make it easier to recognize currency.
The first coin with braille was the 1 Crown from the Isle of Man commemorating the International Year of Disabled persons. Since then more than a hundred coins were minted with braille.
