SCANS OF
REXDALE ENCASED COINS
The first piece I designed for Elaine Rexdale was "Round the Rue". Elaine had so much information she wanted on the piece that we decided to make a separate reverse die announcing her company, Rexdale Publishing. This reverse die was used on her first six pieces.
The entire obverse was now available for information on each book she published. At the top we put the title of the book, sometimes followed by a short catch phrase. Below the coin we have the author's name and the ISBN book registration number. Here is our first piece.
Our second piece was for "Ultra Violet's Pickled Egg Cookbook". We were very pleased with the deep violet color the manufacturer was able to produce.
Our third piece was not made for a book. Rather it was to be given as an award to winners of the Lady Mac Duff Poetry Contest. Lady Mac Duff is a chicken, so we developed our first piece of artwork - a chicken sitting in a nest and reading a book. It appears on both sides of the piece.
Our fourth piece was for "African Sunshine and Shadows". It was going to be our first piece with a foreign coin in it, but unfortunately the African coin was slightly smaller than a US cent and the manufacturer could not make it work. We also moved the artwork up top in the center, so it would be larger.
Our fifth piece was an ambitious project called "Colors". The piece has artwork on it of a painter's pallet. We brainstormed what else we might do, and to my surprise Elaine agreed to make them in the six different colors of the rainbow. As such this is the scarcest of her pieces, since the 1,000 pieces made up only 166 sets.
This was also the final piece ever made by Mintage Masters in Kewanee, Wisconsin. The business was being closed down and sold at the time, and we just made it.
Our first piece with the new manufacturer was "Show Me the $Dough$". We gold-plated the cent, and went with a green encasement for the color of money. Artwork in the center is a fist full of dollars. It turned out very striking.
We had a lot of fun with our seventh piece, "Pippity-Poppity Popcorn Book". Elaine had an outlet for her book in North Dakota, so we thought of working in an Native American Indian theme somehow. That led to the idea of using Indian Head cents, and then also using Buffalo nickels. But there had not been an encased nickel made in the last 50 years! Fortunately the new manufacturer was willing to invest in a nickel-size punch for us. One thing that is not obvious is that they also had to use two different blank thicknesses to hold the cent and nickel. Elaine also went the extra mile and bought higher-grade coins, so that the word LIBERTY was visible on the cent, and so the nickels had full dates. As a 2-coin set, only 500 sets were made. The artwork on the side is of course popcorn.
This piece was also our first round piece. Elaine started a new business called Presbyopian Press, so the piece required a new reverse die. Presbyopian means far-seeing. We decided to use telescopes facing outward on each side of the piece.
Our most recent encased coin is "Inspired by God". For the artwork, we used the hands from Michelangelo's famous painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where God is reaching out to touch Adam. The piece contains our first foreign coin. The book's author, Alma Gisela Oglivie, is from Panama so we used a Panamanian Un Centesimo. The piece is striking because it is all-silver in color.
Because the hole for the coin needed to be so large, Elaine had to create another reverse die. We made this one for the Presbyopian Press so we would have a horseshoe die for each of her companies.
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