50 Pfennig, Stadt Leipzig, 1920

This copy

Accession: OM-00453
Series year: 1920
Actually issued: 1920
council: not read unread
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms.
Grade: AU (IBNS)
Bright; a faint bend at the upper right corner. About uncurrent: bright and unfolded, with light handling - a corner bump or a faint edge tone. Estimated from the 600 dpi archival scan, which cannot show paper crispness, pinholes, pressing or small repairs.
Estimated value: $8 indicative
Category benchmark scaled for grade — an order of magnitude, not an appraisal. Priced 2026-09-26.
Dimensions: 79 × 54.3 mm (±0.6, from the scan)
Themes: Notgeld Serienschein Weimar Republic Saxony Trade fair Municipal finance

The type

Type: 50 Pfennig, Stadt Leipzig, 1920
Printer: Not established
Rarity: common

LeipzigGermany, 1920 borders

Symbology

Advertising as security printing: The fair's prospectus, set at about three point and repeated to fill the whole reverse, doubles as an anti-forgery ground. Nothing is wasted.
The double M: The fair's monogram - two interlocking Ms for *Mustermesse* - in the centre of the reverse. Designed in 1917 and still in use.
Der Rat der Stadt Leipzig: The council's own name and signature; Leipzig had been running its fair since the Middle Ages and was not about to stop mentioning it.

What was happening

Notgeld began in 1914 out of necessity: coin vanished into hoards within weeks of mobilisation and towns printed their own small change because the Reichsbank could not supply enough.

By 1920 it had become something else. The shortage was easing but the collector market was not, and a town could take real marks for paper it hoped would never be presented. So the municipalities commissioned Serienscheine: lithographed sets, printed far beyond any local need, illustrated with whatever the place was proud of - a legend, a famous son, a battle, a joke in dialect. The result is the most inventive body of graphic design in the history of paper money, made by places with a few thousand inhabitants, in the years when Germany's currency was dying.

Leipzig's fifty is a working note from a city of six hundred thousand, valid to the last day of 1920, and its reverse is one of the oddest things in this collection: the entire surface is covered in repeated microtext advertising the Leipziger Mustermesse, the trade fair, explaining that it is the principal market for international trade and is held in March and August each year.

This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 50 Pfennig, Stadt Leipzig, 1920 in the collection.

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