The coins that books are made of

As collectors of coins we see some fascinating and rare currency come through our hands, but what about those coins we've only heard about, or more accurately, only read about. This post will look at some of the coins we may have read about in books, but in all probability not actually seen.

First, we'll start with the Doubloon. You'll probably have heard them in reference to pirates, and Doubloons are also mentioned in Moby Dick where a chapter is titled The Doubloon. These were gold coins weighing 6.77 grams and were worth two Escudos or 32 Reales. Doubloons were minted in Spain, Mexico and New Grenada (modern day Colombia and Peru) between the sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries.

Long John Silver's parrot in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island made Pieces of Eight well known, but what were they? Pieces of eight were made from silver, unlike doubloons which were made of gold, so if you had a doubloon now you could melt it down and put in a Bullionvault (although its value as an historical artefact probably adds to its value as gold). The basic unit of Spanish currency used to be the Reale and a coin worth eight reales was a 'piece of eight' or Spanish Dollar. Amazingly, pieces of eight were legal tender in the USA until the Coinage Act of 1857.

Now we're going to wind back the clock even further to Biblical times. Whether or not you're familiar with the Bible, you'll probably have heard about shekels which are often referred to as a unit of currency. Although Shekels are the unit of currency in modern day Israel, the word actually comes from another ancient language, Akkadian which died out about 100AD. A shekel was about 11 grams in weight. If we're to believe the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, Croesus invented the coin (hence our modern saying 'rich as Croesus'). It is thought these coins were weighed in shekels.