Keep the Change Read online

  Still, there are many present-day nonfiscal uses for pennies: people have figured out how to use them as batteries, algae retardants, and tire-tread checkers.8 It’s easy to turn pennies into tap-shoe taps and hem weights. Pennies buried in the garden yield more fulsome hydrangeas by increasing the pH of the soil. They repel slugs, which can experience electric shocks when they come into contact with copper and zinc. There is also, of course, the age-old practice of tossing pennies into wishing wells, where copper, zinc, and water react to create all kinds of gorgeously muculent spots, speckles, and scars. Whether you prefer shiny new coins or burnished old chestnuts, most would agree that etched marks in copper are irresistible wrinkles of history, lasting pocks documenting the exertions of life.

  CHAPTER

  2

  IN SAM I TRUST

  US Federal Banknote Errors

  IN 1995 I TOOK A JOB with the Gallery at Takashimaya, part of the New York City flagship of an international Japanese retail corporation that enjoyed fifteen billion dollars in sales that year. Designed by Philip Johnson, Takashimaya’s elegant Fifth Avenue shop featured gold-leaf ceilings in an East-meets-West atmosphere. Unfortunately, unlike the Japanese, Westerners aren’t accustomed to buying art in department stores, and the gallery foundered.

  When I announced my resignation, a friend from accounting stopped by to wish me well. “I’ve got a present for you,” he said, and I thought, “How nice,” until he added, “Gimme fifty bucks.”

  My sudden joy evaporated. “C’mon, Sam, I know I work in art and you’re in finance, but anyone knows that’s not a present.”

  “Trust me,” he whispered.

  Sam was six feet four, a steely-eyed Albanian émigré. He must have been hired, at least in part, for his imposing presence—his job involved carrying cash, lots of it. Takashimaya, like other Japanese stores, did its best to provide change in clean, new currency to suggest that it was well prepared and deserving of customer confidence. (Rare is the Tokyo shopkeeper who would press crumpled yen into the hand of a valued customer.) It was Sam’s responsibility to claim standing orders for thousands of new US bills. He regularly carried large sums through the midtown streets to his desk, where he counted and placed stacks of crisp cash in Takashimaya’s tills.

  Stunned by Sam’s brass, I stared at him and reflected on our time as colleagues. He had never exhibited any cause for distrust, but was clearly enjoying making me squirm. I checked my wallet and found sixty-seven dollars, enough to meet his demand and still buy something for lunch.

  I stared up at him one more time and forked over the fifty. At the same time, Sam handed me a small stack of singles. Without counting the bills, I sensed I’d been had and balked.

  “Look carefully, curator,” he snarked, and that’s when my eyes popped. {Fig. 7}

  I shot out of my chair and shook Sam’s big hand in thanks. He smiled broadly and explained how he’d discovered the twelve uncirculated, sequentially numbered bills after his weekly bank run, replaced them with his own money, and set the misprints aside.

  Lunch hour came, and I headed out the door—not to eat but to visit Stack’s, the vaunted numismatics firm in business since 1935. I met with a stony-eyed clerk, who said, “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” pulled on cotton gloves, arrayed the bills on a velvet pad, and examined them through a jeweler’s loupe. My heart started to race. It wasn’t long before I heard, “I can offer you five hundred dollars right now.”

  “No, thank you,” I replied, with my best poker face. My Brooklyn-born mom had instilled in me a wariness of big-city wiles, and alarms sounded in my head when I was offered ten times what I’d paid.

  The next time I visited my hometown of Buffalo, I brought the misprinted money to local coin dealer Harold B. Rice, who followed the same numismatic ritual: white gloves, black velvet, fancy magnifier.

  Harold, whom I’d known and trusted since age five, said, “Hmm” and took quite a while before offering “I can give you nine hundred dollars, cash.”

  Fig. 7

  Sequentially numbered, erroneously printed and issued one-dollar notes

  Fig. 8

  “Star note.” These official error replacement bills attract detail-oriented collectors.

  “Uh…thanks, but no thanks,” I replied, too stunned to part with my burgeoning windfall. Harold sold me archival sleeves, and I loaded up the insufficiently inked bills and placed them where they remain to this day: in a vault.

  So what are these twelve one-dollar bills really worth? If I bring them to a bank, I’ll get twelve standard dollars in exchange, so why did Stack’s offer me five hundred dollars and Rice nearly double that? Because there are many collectors who vie to add such government mistakes to their holdings. (Collectors engaged in this alternative market develop heightened senses. They must be able to identify all types of mistakes, because there are even forgers who specialize in faking error currency.)

  Controls for ensuring the precision of US currency are world-class, and squadrons of determined inspectors operating high-tech machines safeguard the Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s most important product. Each bill is supposed to weigh exactly one gram and measure 2.61 inches wide by 6.14 inches long by 0.0043 inches thick. Defective currency is destroyed, and substitute bills with the same serial numbers are issued. These replacements are known as “star notes” because of the unique asterisks they carry at the ends of their serial numbers. {Fig. 8}

  Hundreds of steps are needed to create US bills. In 2012, for example, more than eight billion rectangles of the government’s proprietary fabric soaked up close to three thousand tons of ink to create just under three hundred and fifty-nine billion dollars. Such large numbers mean that mistakes can and do slip into circulation.

  Miscut one-dollar note

  Officially, misprinted money is worth no more or less than its face value, but competitive collectors invariably pay more for numismatic rarities, and there is a lively trade in “error bills,” i.e., paper currency that is:

  miscut {see opposite}

  misaligned

  inverted

  smeared

  double inked

  overinked

  insufficiently inked

  missing ink

  printed over folds

  double-denominated (when, for example, a one-hundred-dollar obverse is printed with a one-dollar reverse)

  CHAPTER

  3

  SNEAK THIEVES

  A Bit about Clipping

  ISAAC NEWTON, famous for his work with gravity, is less well known for his ferocious role at England’s Royal Mint. Fiscal disarray was rampant when Newton became warden in 1696 and the purity and genuineness of coins varied wildly. Thieves of the time “clipped” coins (snipped or shaved off bits to sell); used punches to steal precious metals (often masking their crimes by filling the holes with cheaper material); and “abstracted a little bullion with acids.”1 Ordinary people knew how to bite coins to gauge their malleability and ascertain the type of metal, and some carried scales to weigh coins and files to notch their edges and determine if coins were pure or plated. {Fig. 9} Newton, who saw the big picture in small details, set feverishly to establishing public trust in England’s money.

  Stealing and selling bits of precious coin metal were fairly inconspicuous schemes, at least until Sir Isaac’s exactitude and knowledge of metallurgy (and alchemy) began shoring up mint operations. He brought in new machinery, helped demand a recall and meltdown of all extant coins, and struck a completely new series of round coins with strict weight and purity regulations.2 Newton completed the massive recoining in just three years and was rewarded with a promotion to master of the royal mint, where he continued to bring order to finance by personally raiding taverns, interrogating suspects, and searching for clues in London’s Newgate Prison (where the pirate Captain William Kidd was held). Newton’s efforts to stabilize British society included urging the enforcement of the death penalty for crimes against the Crown’s currency,
and he was proud of having had many clippers and “coyners” hanged.3

  One of Newton’s important anticlipping innovations was edge milling, a process by which tiny ridges, known as reeds, are added to the rim of a coin. It wasn’t until early in the twenty-first century that an improvement was made to Newton’s reeds and the US Mint introduced coin edges inscribed in specific and consistent locations. Newton’s technique is still in widespread use, and the edges of today’s US dimes, quarters, halves, and dollars feature precise numbers of reeds: according to the US Mint, dimes have exactly 118; quarters, 119; half dollars, 150; and dollars, 189. (The reeds are too tiny for me to tally, so I’m forced to trust the mint’s count.)

  Fig. 9

  Except for the top coin, which is a penny cinched in what appears to be a foil cap from a liquor bottle, I do not know how or why the edges of these contemporary coins were altered.

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was customary to make change by cutting eight-reales coins into the fractional wedges of metal known as “pieces of eight.” Though such practices were illegal, prosecution was rare. Altered coins wreaked havoc in the marketplace and led to bitter altercations, but at the time the public considered capital punishment too draconian a measure for tinkering with metal.

  Ordinary people were not the only debasers of currency, though; nations also engaged in the practice. There has never been a government that could resist the temptation to bail itself out by making coins smaller and/or switching to less valuable metals. My favorite such brazen governmental act involved the silver eight reales coins minted for the Spanish Crown in colonial Guadalajara, Mexico. Soon after these coins were first released in 1821, Mexico declared its independence from Spain, and political instability shook the region. Eventually the fledgling government of Costa Rica nationalized all foreign coins, including the reales, by extracting precious metal from them and counterstamping them with its own coat of arms. It was thus that large, ragged holes were officially plugged out of one nation’s coins to turn them into another nation’s official currency.4

  CHAPTER

  4

  FINE LINE

  The Art of Money

  SOME OF THE FINEST LINES in the art world today are those on US dollar bills. The US Department of the Treasury combines old-world engraving skills with modern machinery to create incredibly detailed notes that inspire confidence and deter illicit reproduction. The image below is an enlargement of five-eighths of one square inch of a dollar bill. {Fig. 10} Just the idea of reproducing all those curvy, tapering lines is daunting; still, the urge is irresistible to many.

  “Shoving the queer” (nineteenth-century slang for passing counterfeit money) is the work of criminals. Artists have higher motivations for their imitations of money, aesthetics and social commentary chief among them. The first true-to-life re-creation of US money made for artistic (as opposed to deceitful) purposes was William Michael Harnett’s 1877 painting of a tattered, ragged-edged five-dollar bill. Harnett chose banknotes for a subject because their flatness suited his passion for trompe l’oeil (French for “fools the eye”) painting. He preferred depicting well-worn bills because of their intrinsic history; when he submitted A Bad Counterfeit to the National Academy of Design for review, the expert judges were so sure Harnett had pasted a real bill on a panel, they removed the glass frame to prove their contention.1 They were wrong. Harnett was that good.

  Fig. 10

  The engraving on US currency is fabulously complex.

  Hundreds of artists have followed Harnett’s lead in the replication of money, many with more provocative intentions, including his friend John Haberle, who, like Harnett, was investigated by the Secret Service.2 Another contemporary, Victor Dubreuil, had a painting of barrels full of cash confiscated and held behind bars at the Treasury until, under 1909 law, it was destroyed.3 Dubreuil’s paintings were not as realistic as Harnett’s or Haberle’s, but law enforcement was apparently very concerned about populists with precise rendering skills.

  A fine line separates mutilation from art. A dollar covered in graffiti, for example, can be seen as good for nothing or, alternatively, as an artifact of stimulating complexity. By the time the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century passion for realistic paintings of cash died down, twentieth-century artists, including Marisol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, were creating their own cheekily subverted dollars. The tradition continues with twenty-first-century artists such as Mark Wagner (see frontispiece), who desecrates dollars only to reinvest them with new value, symbolism, and wit. Wagner spends about one thousand dollars a year on his main art supply, one-dollar bills. He slices them into thin ribbons, sorts the bits by color (or the absence thereof), and creates often monumental collages. As Wagner writes, “Anarchists are certain I’m an anarchist because I cut up a favorite tool of the oppressor. Capitalists think I’m a capitalist because I revel in it.”4

  Back when dollars came more dearly to him, Wagner and a studio mate were discussing where to go for “linner,” their only meal of the day. Wagner realized his billfold was empty and, famished and annoyed, began to grouse. Then Wagner’s friend pointed out that there were spendable dollar bills on the worktable right in front of him, waiting to be used in his artwork. In Wagner’s mind, the crisp, new bills had transformed from money to nonmoney and back again.5

  Wagner’s blinding focus is typical of altered-currency aficionados. As artist and collector of rubber- stamped bills Adamandia Kapsalis posted on Facebook: “I don’t want the money, just the photos of stamps on the money. Hmm…did I just say I don’t want money?”6

  Today’s most venerated money artist is J. S. G. Boggs. He doesn’t mutilate currency; he makes incredibly detailed freehand illustrations of money, always adding or subtracting features so anyone giving more than a cursory glance will know they are fake. Boggs’ deft acts of civil disobedience deconstruct the function and symbolism of money: he exchanges his drawings of banknotes for food and other necessities, and frames and exhibits the real money he insists on receiving in change. The Secret Service has several times confiscated Boggs’s work and personal effects, but has never successfully prosecuted him for counterfeiting. Meanwhile, two and a half miles south of Secret Service headquarters, Boggs’s art sits proudly in the national collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

  Back when Boggs was listed in the telephone book, I called and asked if he would be a guest teacher in my after-school museum-studies program. We struck a deal that he would be paid seventeen bucks: one hand-drawn bill per grade-schooler. Boggs came to New York and started his lesson by drawing a picture on the chalkboard and asking the students, “What is it?”

  “A dog?”

  “No.”

  “A dog sitting down?”

  “No.”

  “A beagle?”

  “No.”

  “A bear?”

  “No.”

  This went on for fifteen minutes, until Boggs elicited the answer he sought:

  “A picture of a dog.”

  Then he asked, “What’s a dollar worth?”

  “Four quarters?”

  “No.”

  “Ten dimes?”

  “No.”

  Another fifteen minutes elapsed before a child said, “I’d shovel snow for an hour to get a dollar.” Boggs’s Socratic method made everyone in the room realize that money is only a symbol—that dollars are worth different things to each of us.

  Boggs likes to make people think new thoughts. He places value where it hasn’t existed and makes art that one doesn’t have to be rich to collect, just fortuitous. He also knows that anyone can, for free or low cost, build an archive of cartoon dollars or Monopoly money. I save such “flash” (play) money and showed some to the kids and Boggs, who asked if he could buy my collection. Was this another of Boggs’s provocative tests? I might never know, because I declined without even asking what he was offering. I’ve lost contact with Boggs, but one thing is certain: his final quest
ion came an hour too late. Selling my collection would have flown in the face of the lesson he’d just imparted.

  Fig. 11

  Beriah Wall, Piggy Bank, 2013

  Fig. 12

  Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Cash Tendered, 2003

  Fig. 13

  David Greg Harth, I Am America, 2012

  Fig. 14

  Peggy Diggs, series of rubber-stamped one-dollar bills, 2003

  Sculptor Beriah Wall avoids breaking the law by making coins out of clay instead of metal.7 By using text sparingly on his coins and placing them around town for people to find, he ensures his work is open to numerous interpretations. {Fig. 11} Performance artist Nicolás Dumit Estévez demonetizes dollars by placing them in glassine envelopes, sealing and signing the flaps, and selling them with the caveat that bills removed from the envelopes will no longer “be recognized as art by the artist or any party involved in the sale.”8 According to Estévez, if you take the dollar out of the envelope it is no longer art but merely another dollar worth one hundred cents. I purchased my one-dollar bill, {Fig. 12} part of an edition of ninety-nine, for ninety-nine cents. Art propagandist David Greg Harth achieves wide circulation by rubber-stamping bills with bold political squibs, {Fig. 13} as does artist Peggy Diggs, who inks the cream margin along the edges of bills with essential questions such as “What do you think is gained in poverty and lost through wealth?” {Fig. 14} Jim Costanzo, artist and founder of the Aaron Burr Society (which practices nonviolent resistance to authorities it believes has stolen money from the public), also creates socially pointed art, rubber-stamping and spending real bills with bold, red slogans such as “Free Money.” {Fig. 15} Some of Costanzo’s objectives mirror those of the Occupy Wall Street movement and might be accomplished by instead totally destroying money, but messages like his travel best when emblazoned on US cash.