“Funny money,” commented a visitor in our earshot at the Chase Manhattan Bank Museum of Moneys of the World in New York’s Rockefeller Center. The visitor, a Texan we surmised from his drawl, height, and wide-brim Stetson, was referring to a display of Yap stone money. One Yap specimen measures some thirty inches in diameter and weighs about 175 pounds. It is worth ten thousand coconuts or one wife, or so the sign read.
Funny money is right, we mused, but not for the reason that seemed to catch the eye of most of the sightseers and what we guessed were a few stray numismatists. They were fascinated by the bizarre in money: the tiny gold coin, little bigger than a pinhead, from India; the large copper coin weighing 31 pounds from Sweden; the Joachimsthaler coin minted about 1520 in Bohemia, the ancestor of the American “thaler” or, later, dollar; the “genuine” American wooden nickels; money old and new, money in big denominations and small, money in assorted shapes and materials—money made of metal jand paper of course but also made of salt, of grain, of fish hooks, of musket balls, of cacao seeds, of brick tea, even of woodpecker scalps.
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