75 Pfennig, Bad Lippspringe, 1921
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This copy
- Accession
- OM-00464
- 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
- 99.5 × 76.6 mm (±1.1, from the scan)
- Themes
- NotgeldSerienscheinWeimar RepublicWestphaliaSpa townCharlemagne
The type
- Type
- 75 Pfennig, Bad Lippspringe, 1921
- Printer
- Gebrüder Jänecke, Hannover
- Rarity
- common
Symbology
- The baptism of the Saxons
- In 776 Charlemagne received the submission of Saxon leaders at the Lippe springs and had them baptised. It is one of the founding scenes of the forced Christianisation of Saxony, and Lippspringe put it on a seventy-five-pfennig note.
- Anno 776
- Set in the banner above the scene. A town reaching back eleven hundred and forty-five years for a claim on importance.
- Lippia quillt allhier
- The verse opens by naming the spring itself, famous through Roman annals - the Lippe rises in the town and the town is named for 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.
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 seventy-five carries the town's largest claim: die Sachsentaufe a. d. Quellen d. Lippe, Karls I. Gr., anno 776 - the baptism of the Saxons at the springs of the Lippe by Charlemagne in 776. The face sets the whole story out in a Latinate verse about Roman annals, the camp of the elder Nero, and the three solemn assemblies the emperor called here.
This account belongs to the type, not this copy — it is shared by every 75 Pfennig, Bad Lippspringe, 1921 in the collection.
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