25 Pfennig, Bad Lippspringe, 1921
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This copy
- Accession
- OM-00462
- Series year
- 1921
- Actually issued
- 1921
- mayor
- not read unread
Printed as a facsimile; the engraver's reduction has lost the letter forms.
- Grade
- UNC (IBNS)
As issued: full body, square corners, bright unfaded ink and no fold through the design. Estimated from the 600 dpi archival scan, which shows folds, soiling and edge condition but not paper crispness, pinholes, pressing or small repairs.
- Estimated value
- $10 indicative
Category benchmark scaled for grade — an order of magnitude, not an appraisal. Priced 2026-09-26.
- Dimensions
- 100.2 × 76.9 mm (±0.6, from the scan)
- Themes
- NotgeldSerienscheinWeimar RepublicWestphaliaSpa townWoodcut design
The type
- Type
- 25 Pfennig, Bad Lippspringe, 1921
- Printer
- Gebrüder Jänecke, Hannover
- Rarity
- common
Symbology
- Wald-Naturtheater
- The forest theatre, a natural amphitheatre among the trees. Spa towns needed entertainment as much as water, and Lippspringe built one.
- Two fighting bulls
- Drawn in a heavy black line filling the whole panel - the theatre's emblem rather than a scene from a play.
- Josef Dominicus
- Signed on the plate. A Paderborn artist who drew the whole set in the same uncompromising woodcut manner.
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.
Bad Lippspringe is a spa at the source of the Lippe, and its 1921 set was drawn by Josef Dominicus of Paderborn in heavy black-line woodcut. The town's claim is antiquity: the springs appear in Roman writers, a camp of the elder Nero stood nearby, and Charlemagne summoned the Saxons here three times.
The twenty-five is about the town's open-air theatre: two bulls locked head to head above a verse promising that when the farmer and the spa guest alike enjoy the forest playhouse, things will certainly be well soon.
This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 25 Pfennig, Bad Lippspringe, 1921 in the collection.
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