NEW BOOK: EVASION AND EVASION-RELATED TOKENS

PREV ARTICLE NEXT ARTICLE FULL ISSUE PREV FULL ISSUE

V29 2026 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 29, Number 16, 2026, Article 4

Jeff Rock submitted this description of a useful new 88-page book on British Evasion Coppers. Thanks! -Editor

A new digital work on evasion coppers has just been released, by Timothy Montgomery, a friend whose evasion collection I photographed earlier this year. This is the first substantive update to the Cobwright book, which was done in 1993, which bore the wonderfully absurd title A Journey Through the Monkalokian Rain Forests in Search of the Spiny Fubbaduck - a series as weird as evasions simply needed a weird book title too. I did a very long article on evasions for the Journal of Early American Numismatics a few years ago, which went into what the series is, who made them, when they were made and where they circulated - but that was an intro to the series, not an updated reference guide of any sort.

Evasion coppers are imitations of regal British and Irish copper coins that nearly always have the correct style of design - a left or right facing bust on the obverse and either a seated Britannia figure or a harp on the reverse - and come in both halfpenny and farthing sizes. What differentiates them from counterfeits of regal coins (of which there are MANY!) is that the legends on one or both sides was purposely made different from that of an official coin. For example, instead of GEORGIUS III REX which is found on the obverse of regal and counterfeit issues, an evasion might have the legend read GDOROVIS TII RDX, or an Irish style reverse might read HIBERSIA instead of HIBERNIA. These legend changes were supposedly done because they would evade the law on counterfeiting, which stated that a counterfeit needed to be "an exact similitude."

All evasion coppers were made in the last half decade of the 18th century, and came to an end when Matthew Boulton's Soho Mint coins were circulated in large enough numbers to drive out the lightweight evasions, counterfeits, and Conder tokens. There are roughly 850 known varieties of evasion coppers, and though they were literally being collected and listed while they were being made (James Conder included 100 or so in his 1798 work on tokens, and Miss Sarah Sophia Banks collected over 100 just in the 1796-7 period), the literature on them has always been meager.

US dealer Lyman Low did the first detailed listing of 200-odd varieties, which was then expanded and appeared in James Atkins 1892 book on 18th century tokens, where just under 500 were listed. The series remained more or less dormant in terms of research (though still avidly collected) for the next century, until the publication of the Cobwright book which gave a new attribution system that was flexible enough to incorporate new dies as they were discovered. The biggest drawback of the Cobwright book was that it was just a listing of the legends found on each die, but with no photographs - and sometimes the descriptions were vague enough that they could apply to more than a single die.

This update is a nice addition to Cobwright, and fixes some of the errors in that book - and provides photographs of an awful lot of obverse and reverse dies, which is what the series greatly needs. He is making it available on eBay for a minimal price (just $5).

A few notes: you get a PDF file, not a printed version, but you are able to print it if you wish. Also, while this fixes a lot, there are many unlisted varieties that are not in it, and not all the dies listed in Cobwright are photograped simply because they weren't in his collection. BUT this is a very useful stopgap until a more thorough book comes out, and it will be useful enough to attribute an awful lot of varieties, and is best used alongside the Cobwright reference (though the PDF does contain a listing of the legends, so even without Cobwright you would be able to attribute most examples). The PDF version will give a link to the photo itself (all of which I photographed with my new camera setup, and look quite good!) so that you can enlarge it and look at finer details, which is something a print book doesn't offer!

If you have any interest at all in the series - and you should, because it crosses over into the colonial series (Washington North Wales and Auctori Plebis tokens), counterfeit British and Irish coppers (with many shared dies between them), and Conder token series (with a number of Conder dies becoming evasion dies late in their lives) - this is a phenomenal new addition to your library!