Stack’s Bowers Galleries’ Coin Resource Center includes resources other than entries describing different series of U.S. coins; it also includes Coin Collector’s Guides, brief primers on collecting concepts and strategies. This week’s blog will cover the Guide on Exonumia.
Exonumia is a term used for medallic objects and other adjacent ephemera without legal tender status, often, though not exclusively, produced by non-government entities. Non-art and art medals (a more granular exploration of the distinction between art and non-art medals, and their exonumia status, will very likely be the topic of a future “Did You Know?” blog), trade tokens, regular-issue coins modified in various ways (i.e. counterstamped, elongated, turned into folk art), badges and ribbons, and other material all fall under the umbrella of exonumia, sometimes “exo” for short. The lines delineating exonumia from more traditional numismatic material and non-numismatic ephemera are sometimes blurry and each collector can to a certain extent, decide for themselves what constitutes exonumia or what fits into their exonumia collections. It’s an expansive category and collectors would do well to consult our guide, as well as the guides on other numismatic subfields.
Our listing delves into these and other complexities and outlines a few broad, popularly-collected exonumia categories like Hard Times Tokens, Medals, and Altered Coins.
