Robot Claw

It’s time to put this too-long series to rest, but not before a few last words on this pressed penny collection.

I sorted the 271 coins by where they were obtained, and this was easy for about 90% of them, challenging for another 9% and – so far – impossible for these three:

The top left features an unidentifiable design with no words, and was pressed onto a 5 euro cent coin, which means Scotland or the UK. Perhaps it was somewhere in Cardiff? I’ll probably never know. The top right is a misaligned penny and from a snippet of writing on the back was made in Santa Cruz. As for what it was supposed to show, who knows? The bottom is a real mystery. The Pamir was boat that sunk near The Azores during a hurricane in 1957. The origination of the ship suggests a German coin, but it’s pressed on a US penny so I have no idea where I got it.

The location of where I pressed this one is also unknown:

Isn’t it remarkable? The entire Lord’s Prayer pressed onto a tiny penny! It’s very detailed and easy to read and I imagine many of these have lived a happy life in purses and wallets over the years.

Let’s move on to ‘bad’ examples. The truth is most of the collection is forgettable – even arguably trash – and since I was always pressing for Bernard I tended to prioritize outrageous or ludicrous designs. Of the 271, these are the ones that raise my eyebrows the most:

On the left we have a penny showing the comic character Storm, which was pressed at Universal Studios. The detail is good but unfortunately the character is almost unrecognizable and you need to gaze very closely to even understand what you’re looking at. The next is a Pez character and I don’t think I need to go into details as to why it should never have been made. The third is a ‘likeness’ of Bruce Springsteen so bad I very much doubt anyone could identify him without the name at the bottom, and the M&M’s NYC fireman penny makes the Pez example look desirable 🙂

As for my favourites, after some consideration I decided on these four:

The top was obtained at Hirose Game Center in Akihabara and shows the player ship from the classic arcade game Darius (I assume you don’t need explanation as to why I love this penny). Then we have a Tardis obtained at the now-closed Dr Who Experience in Cardiff, Wales. The Ned Kelly one – pressed somewhere in Melbourne – I love for its ludicrousness (a penny featuring a criminal?), and of course I’m going to treasure a Nessie penny obtained at Loch Ness.

Now sorted and catalogued here, the pennies all live happily in a special dedicated book I bought for them, and this will now sit on a shelf or in a box forever. I’m not planning on adding to the collection – so no, you don’t have to press pennies for me if you find any! – unless I find a truly special or unusual design. But there’s enough nostalgia in this collection that I’m happy I own the ones I have 🙂

You knew it was coming… here are the ‘pennies’ from Japan:

A quick look at one of the collectors websites shows many machines scattered across Japan. As usual most of these are at tourist sights, and the coins shown above were no doubt pressed at such machines.

The Japanese machines dispense blanks into the die and are all electronically made (so no turning of cranks). They’re a little more expensive as well, at ¥100 per coin. Unlike US machines they usually only offer a single image. They coins are notably higher quality, with lots of crisp detail, such as the above from the ‘Odaiba Takoyaki Museum’.

Looking ahead to our next trip (in a month) I see a few machines at some of the locations we will attend. Maybe I’ll be adding to this collection sooner than I expected!

And finally we end this showcase with the coins pressed in Australia. Once again these use blanks instead of real coins, and the quantity I have suggest the machines are reasonably common.

As usual these are mostly found at tourist locations, but I don’t recall if they resemble the US machines (with multiple designs) or the Japanese ones. I find it amusing the relatively small gift store at The Big Banana had a coin machine: I suppose they’re inexpensive to manufacture and presumably pay for themselves since these coins are cheap souvenirs.

I’ve got a little more to say about this collection, but I’ll save those thoughts for a final post tomorrow.

A shorter post today, wrapping up the rest of the American pennies. We’ll start with these from Disney and Universal Studios:

These were obtained at Disney and Universal parks and I think one of these may be the oldest pressed penny I own. Specifically, this one:

If my memory is correct, the above was pressed when we first went to Disney (in Florida) in 1996, which I just learned was only two years after they first added penny machines to the park. In the parks the pennies cost $1 (as opposed to $0.50 almost everywhere else) and I’ve read that today there are dozens of machines across all the Florida parks, with about 240 unique pennies available. If you’re a diehard penny collector, you’ll have a great time hunting them down at Disney!

It seems Disney pennies are particularly popular with collectors, and in the 30 years since they added the machines there have been an astonishing 2500+ different pennies! Since Disney owns so many licenses now, this includes such examples as Star Wars, Marvel and even Tron pennies (none of which I own):

It’s also worth nothing that Disney parks in other countries have pressed ‘pennies’ as well, but I’ll get back that in a few days…

As for the Universal coins, I’ll spotlight this one:

Shortly after we went to Universal the ET ride was closed. We knew it was on its last legs and rode it several times, enjoying it quite a bit, so this penny – which would no longer be available – is somewhat nostalgic.

Let’s move on now, to animals:

Zoos are common locations for penny machines, and the above are some examples of coins pressed at zoos or animal parks. Many of these don’t even have the name of the zoo on the penny and I like this. Australia never had pressed coins when I was a kid, but I imagine if they did I would have preferred the animal ones over all others…

Except maybe for the dinosaur ones! 🙂

About 100 of the pressed pennies in the collection are from the USA, not including the NYC ones I covered yesterday. While a few are hard to decipher, I think I have pennies from eleven states: New York, California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Florida, Connecticut, Vermont, Nevada and Hawaii.

These can be divided into two broad groups: attraction specific and location specific. The above are examples of the former, which were pressed at tourist attractions in Salem, Rochester, Gilroy and Orlando. Salem in particular was a treasure trove of penny machines, and there’s at least a dozen different ones in the collection.

Here’s some more pressed at tourist attractions. You can see the variety of size here, which varies depends on the strength of the machine. When you turn the crank on the older machines you can feel the gears turning as the die squashes the penny, but many of the newer machines are electronic and the pennies they vend are usually of identical size.

The above are some location-specific examples. Strangely, considering Bernard and I have been there a few times, there’s only a single Vegas penny in the collection. The detail on the one on the right (from New Hampshire) is extremely high, which I noted since I’ve read on collectors sites that some believe the overall quality of the dies & machines is declining.

A few years ago on our northeast road trip Kristin and I hunted pennies for Bernard as part of a deal I’d made with him. We used a website to track down machines, prepared a bag of quarters and clean coins, and in those few days pressed a total of 72 pennies! It was fun finding new machines and a little disappointing when we found broken ones.

I believe the above two were obtained on that trip, and they’re the only ones I have with sports teams on them. Usually I never would have pressed these, but my goal was to astonish Bernard with an abundance of new coins 🙂

Pennies often share themes, and I’ve got a few with the US flag and sharks, but the most common motif in the collection is mermaids! All five are shown above, from four different cities. You can see the ones from Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz have the same art, albeit at a slightly different size.

I’m not done with US coins, and tomorrow I’ll have a few subsets. Including perhaps the most ‘valuable’ coins in this small collection…

This is a pressed penny:

The first ‘elongated penny’ dates back to 1893, where for the first time a machine squashed pennies into souvenirs at the Chicago Worlds Fair. Since then people have been pressing and collecting them and tens of thousands of different designs exist.

The typical machine looks like the above: you put in two quarters (the cost) and one penny, then turn a crank and a die squashes the penny imprinting a picture or phrase onto it as a souvenir. Most machines have 4 or more styles available, so getting all four ends up costing $2.04. These machines are often seen at tourist sites here in the USA, and variants exist in other countries worldwide.

Collectors store these pennies in dedicated books and folders, and one such enthusiast was Bernard. Now though, his collection has been passed onto me. There are several reasons for this, but I think the two most pertinent are:
1) Bernard has many talents, but unlike myself he doesn’t have the heart of a true collector.
2) The vast majority of the pennies in his collection were purchased and pressed by me!

So in essence Bernard was taking care of my penny collection for a couple of decades, and now he’s passed them back to me 🙂

After removing them all from their little books, sorting, cataloguing and putting them all back into a much larger book it’s time to showcase this collection of 271 pennies, and each day this week I’ll have a variety to show.

We’ll start today with pennies pressed in New York City.

There are over 60 different pennies in this collection that were obtained in NYC, often from tourist sites but some from various shops. The above 16 were all pressed using a machine at the very top of the One World Trade observatory that I visited this past summer. (The photo is black and white since the reflective pennies are difficult to photograph and this seems the best way to show detail.)

This photo shows famous tourist sites in pressed penny form: Times Square, the Empire State Building, the (old) World Trade Center and a Kong atop the ESB. At the start of this post you saw one of four different Statue Of Liberty pennies in the collection. I’ve also got pennies showing Rockefeller Center, Ellis Island, Broadway and the NYC skyline.

Pennies aren’t just at tourist sites, and several big shops in NYC – usually near Times Square – have machines inside for tourists to use. From these we obtained a shocking dozen different M&M’s pennies, a few Forrest Gump pennies, a variety of portraits (from Madame Tussaud’s) and a few tourist elongates emblazoned with the Ben & Jerry’s logo.

There’s also cute examples like these. As mentioned the vast majority of these pennies I had pressed myself, and my rule (since I was always sending them to Bernard) was to prioritize tourist sights over the ‘lucky’ type but in actuality this sort of thing is common in the machines.

At almost 25% of the collection the NYC pennies are the largest subset, but in many ways they are the least interesting. As this week progresses you can look forward to a wide range of unusual pennies from other locations, and even from countries that don’t even use pennies at all. Stay tuned…