50 Heller, Marktgemeinde Mondsee, 1920

Austria in 1919 was a republic of six and a half million people left holding the currency of an empire of fifty. The Austro-Hungarian Bank was in liquidation, the peace treaties had cut the country off from most of its coal and much of its food, and small coin simply vanished: hoarded against worse to come, melted for the metal, or carried across the new frontiers where it bought more. Shops could not give change, and a country that cannot give change cannot trade.

So the communes printed their own. A council resolution, a local printer, a redemption date and the pledge of the commune's entire movable and immovable property - that was the whole legal apparatus behind several thousand separate issues of Heller notes between 1919 and 1921. Vienna tolerated it while it solved a real problem and moved to stop it in 1920, by which time the notes had found a second market: collectors would pay more than face value for a complete set, so a village could raise real money by printing money it hoped would never be presented. The artwork improved as the need receded.

Mondsee sits on its lake at the western edge of Upper Austria, a market town of a few thousand with an abbey, a summer trade and the Schafberg behind it. Its notes were cut by an artist signing himself Reisenbichler in the manner then fashionable in Austrian graphic art: heavy woodcut line, hand-lettered display type, a plain two-colour register. All three denominations are redeemable to 31 December 1920 on the signature of one man, the mayor Anton Kaltenbrunner, whose name is set in type rather than signed - there were too many notes to sign.