50 Pfennig, Stadt Leipzig, 1920

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.

Leipzig's fifty is a working note from a city of six hundred thousand, valid to the last day of 1920, and its reverse is one of the oddest things in this collection: the entire surface is covered in repeated microtext advertising the Leipziger Mustermesse, the trade fair, explaining that it is the principal market for international trade and is held in March and August each year.