• It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
  It seemed like a good idea to create a coin catalogue with a difference. Coin value catalogues already exist for most western countries, and also for world coins in printed form. Although these will eventually appear on the internet, the editors and publishers of these catalogues don't expect to produce their catalogues for nothing, they do it for money, as a business. People don't expect to pay for information they find on the internet. We believe that the "Coin of the Year" concept has never before been produced in printed form, and would make an interesting addition to the world wide web, and the information it contains is available free.

• An image of a coin from a particular year gives an instant impression of a facet of life at that time, and can be a useful teaching tool for historians.
• Coins and money are closely linked to civilisation, so closely that we often take them for granted, and forget to look at them.
• Why do we choose certain coins for particular dates? It's slightly arbitrary, but to give a few examples...
• Mention 1780 to most coin dealers, and they will instantly call the silver Maria Theresa thaler to mind, simply because it has been restruck (re-issued) with the same "frozen" date as a commemorative coin ever since her death.
• The cartwheel penny or twopence produced by Matthew Boulton and James Watt compete with each other for the honour of representing 1797. The twopence wins our vote because it is the larger of the two, being twice the weight of the penny, and it was only issued for the one year, whereas large copper pennies, albeit slightly lighter, were made until 1860.
• We chose the krugerrand to represent 1967, because it was the first year of issue, and krugerrands went on to sell by the millions in subsequent years.
• We note that Krause Publications of Wisconsin have a "Coin of the Year" (COTY) programme, which appears to have been running for some time now, but there is no connection between theirs and ours. Theirs relates only to modern coins, and they select a number of newly designed coins each year in different categories, with an overall winner. Our "COTY" is intended to cover every possible year eventually, back to 78 BC or possibly earlier.
• Bandwidth
  Another reason for the creation of this site was to reduce the bandwidth usage of our existing commercial website, hence this non-commercial one. Our existing site is just too successful.

Coin of the Year - Home