LUXEMBOURG 50 centimes 1914 ESSAI

Description

There are some crudities in the design of this piece. Notice the position of the lettering on the reverse. The die was set up partially by hand.

Luxembourg got started as a duchy in 963 AD and passed through various families, occasionally disappearing, as it disappeared into France during the Napoleonic period, then reemerging. The current dynasty grew out of the German Nassau-Weilburg family.

The political arrangements that resulted in the nations of modern Europe began to emerge out of local autonomy starting in the 7th century AD or so. Europe, for our purposes, stretches from Greenland to somewhere in Russia. Collectors of Europe would likely include Russia. Collectors of Asia, even though about 2/3 of Russia is in Asia, probably not.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.