25 Pfennig, Stadt Aschaffenburg, forest 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.

This note takes the forest. The face seats St. Martin in his mitre between two red-roofed towers, with the Mainz wheel on one side and the Bavarian lozenges on the other, on a chequered floor. The reverse leaves the town entirely: a stag leaping out of the wood inside a wreath, woodpeckers on the trunks in the side panels, and across the foot the line Gott erhalt Wild und Wald! - God preserve game and forest.