NEW BOOK: HEADS & TALES

PREV ARTICLE NEXT ARTICLE FULL ISSUE PREV FULL ISSUE

V29 2026 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 29, Number 11, 2026, Article 8

An article by Andrew Crellin of Sterling & Currency alerted me to a book published last year. -Editor

Granville Mawer Heads and Tales book cover

For some 2700 years we have used them to pay our debts and claim our dues. We have minted trillions of the little metal discs. Even the invention of paper money hardly slowed their proliferation. Indeed, coins made of gold continued to underpin the finances of the world until the twentieth century, but from that eminence the descent has been precipitous.

It is safe to predict that sometime in our century coins will cease to circulate as currency. Our pockets will be the lighter but so will our connection to the past. We will have dispensed with something which for half of recorded history has preserved in hard copy, sometimes uniquely, an account of our doings. We should at least say goodbye.

This book is a valedictory survey. It follows the story of coins from conception through substance to shadow. Presenting on average a tale for each generation since the beginning, it celebrates the rise and chronicles the demise of a remarkable invention.

Here's an excerpt from a review by Andrew Leigh of the Royal Australian Mint. -Editor

When I first began reading Heads and Tales, I was expecting a survey of coinage. Informative, perhaps even a little weighty. What I found instead was a book that is witty, elegant and delightfully idiosyncratic. A book that wears its learning lightly but never slouches. A book about coins, yes – but also about characters, chaos and the curious things we choose to commemorate in metal. A book with proof-quality scholarship and circulation-level charm.

Granville Allen Mawer has taken a subject that might have seemed numismatic in the narrowest sense, and given us something broader, richer and more alive. He reminds us that coins are not just currency. They are miniature monuments. They tell stories of empires and impostors, of saints and scoundrels, of innovation, inflation and, occasionally, elephants.

This is one of the many joys of Heads and Tales. It doesn't just list coins. It animates them. Each coin becomes a vignette: a parable of power, persuasion or sheer peculiarity. We meet a she-wolf suckling twins, a bronze dagger pretending to be money, an elephant in battle formation, and an emperor whose portrait on a coin tried to claim divine status, while everyone around him quietly rolled their eyes.

There are phrases here that made me laugh out loud, and others that stopped me mid-page. Mawer describes coins as ‘fossils', not in the sense of being obsolete, but as imprints of the societies that made them. He points out that ‘not everything gets to leave a mark', but coins often do – literally and metaphorically. They reflect what societies valued, who held power, and what those in charge wanted you to believe.

In Mawer's hands, coins become the straight men in a long-running comedy about human ambition. They're minted in honour of victories that never quite materialised. They're devalued, demonetised and occasionally demonised. They appear in plays by Aristophanes and policies by Augustus. And through it all, they remain small, circular carriers of big ideas.

Part of what makes this book so compelling is Mawer's voice. It is dry, precise and wonderfully wry. His background in the public service – where understatement is both a virtue and a defence mechanism – gives him the ideal tone for a project like this. He knows when to be exact, when to be elliptical, and when to let the facts speak for themselves, especially when they're absurd.

But are coins on their last legs? Here's an excerpt from Andrew Crellin's review. See the complete article online. -Editor

An excellent book on the history of coins was launched in Canberra in August last year. It took me a while to acquire it, but I'm pleased I did. It covers the history of mankind's use of coinage in a focused and insightful way - more than a hundred different coins are highlighted to depict the evolution of coinage.

I was familiar with a number of the coins that were selected; many others were new to me.

As much as I enjoyed reading and (re-reading) about them, I couldn't help but disagree with the book's subtitle, that coins are suffering a complete demise.

The trouble is, coins (or at least money) serve more than one role - they have more than one job. I have a hypothesis about this - coins are not suffering a complete demise, but the role they're serving is changing.

My own experience tells me that while cash (and by extension, coins) are being used less and less, there is much evidence they are now being used far more often as a store of value than ever before.

I spent several hours wading through the annual reports of the Royal Australian Mint and came up with two tables of statistics - the number of coins struck for circulation each year and the dollar value of the numismatic items sold by the Royal Australian Mint each year. Put both of them side by side, and we can plainly see why my gut tells me that coins are not going to be suffering a demise any time soon.

As the graphs here show, while the Royal Australian Mint struck 333 million for circulation in 2001 to and just 47 million in 2023 ( a fall of around 86%!), sales of their numismatic products rose from $18.9 million in 2001 to $87.7 million in 2023 (a rise of around 363%!). Looking at the trend line in both of those graphs, we can see they're clearly moving in different directions.

These are of course just two points of data, but I believe they show an underlying trend - at the Royal Australian Mint at least, more coins are being produced for use as a store of value than they are as a medium of exchange.

We can see that one form of coin is being called for less and less, while there's an increasing appetite for a different type of coin. To the degree that the staff of the Royal Australian Mint invent and market new coin products that meet that demand, we can expect to see the graph showing numismatic sales to continue to diverge from that showing production of circulating coinage. While the production of circulating coins can only decline so far as zero, I wonder what the limit to the growth in numismatic sales is?

Bullion coins are certainly a store of value, and these likely make a large portion of Mint sales. While some may question the suitability (as a store of value) of commemorative coin and medal products priced well above their bullion value, there is clearly a market for them, and those which are manufactured rarities of limited number clearly also have a healthy aftermarket. Long live coins! -Editor

To read the complete article, see:
The Rise and Demise of Coins? Pffft. (https://www.sterlingcurrency.com.au/blog/news-research/the-fine-art-of-numismatics/the-rise-and-demise-of-coins-pffft/)