25 Pfennig, Stadt Aschaffenburg, Spessart design, 1920

Notgeld - "emergency money". German towns, districts and firms began printing their own small change in 1914, when silver and nickel coin disappeared into hoards within weeks of mobilisation, and did not really stop until the stabilisation of 1923.

What began as necessity turned into a craze. By 1920 municipalities were commissioning Serienscheine: lithographed sets aimed squarely at collectors, printed far beyond any local need, illustrated with local legends, landmarks, famous sons and jokes in dialect. Selling them was itself a way of raising money - the town took real marks for notes it hoped would never be presented for redemption. The result is the most inventive body of graphic design in the history of paper money, produced by places with a few thousand inhabitants.

Aschaffenburg sits on the Main at the edge of the Spessart forest. For six hundred years it belonged not to Bavaria but to the Archbishop-Electors of Mainz, who kept a residence here; it passed to Bavaria only in 1814. Both facts are on its money. The shield with the six-spoked red wheel is Mainz; the blue and white lozenges are Bavaria; and the bishop who holds or sits between them is St. Martin, patron of the Mainz see and of Aschaffenburg's collegiate church.

The town issued a set of Serienscheine in 1920, numbered, valid bis auf Widerruf - until revoked - over the signature of the mayor Dr. Wilhelm Matt. They were drawn by Heinz and Schiestl and printed by Stuertz in Wuerzburg, and between them they work through everything the town had to be proud of: its two allegiances, the forest it sits against, and the painter who worked here.

The second twenty-five in the set stands St. Martin up rather than seating him: a haloed bishop holding the Mainz wheel in one hand and the Bavarian lozenges in the other, the two allegiances literally balanced.

The reverse goes into the Spessart with a hunter - a bearded man in a broad hat with a staff and a horn, under the greeting Frisch auf and above the words Im Spessart, with hares in the upper corners and wild boar in the lower ones. It is the same forest as the other twenty-five, seen from inside it.