Reading the coin: a numismatic guide to Victorian love tokens

The piece I want to show you first is not for sale. It is my own.

It is an 1877 Seated Liberty half-dollar, engraved on the reverse in eighteen lines of flawless French script with a complete restaurant menu. Huîtres. Consommé Mericourt. Tortue Verte au Claire. Timbales des Gourmets. Bass Rayée à la Margaux. Selle de Mouton à l'Anglaise. Course after course, written in a hand so even and so confident that I, who can barely write a grocery list legibly, cannot fathom how it was done by a single engraver with a graver and a steady wrist.

Who was the engraver? Who was the diner? My best theory — and it is only a theory — is that a newlywed couple went somewhere grand on their honeymoon, had a meal so extraordinary that they wanted to remember it forever, and commissioned this piece on their return. The second item on the menu, Tortue Verte au Claire, appears on sixteen New York City restaurant menus held by the New York Public Library between 1894 and 1916. That timing is consistent with the love token era.

I have spent years thinking about this token. I still do not know. And as I like to say: if these coins could talk, what stories they would tell.

There is a second one. A dealer who knew I had this menu called me — called me — when he found another. I own both.  But pairs are so rare and now I have more questions that will go unanswered.  I am working on a theory.

I tell you this not to brag but to make a point. Every Victorian love token begins as a coin.

This is the part of the story that garners almost as much interest as what the coin has been transformed into. Love tokens were a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, spanning countries, currencies, and denominations — though their primary home was the United States. The coin under the engraving is what tells you approximately when the token was made, where it came from, and often who could afford to commission it.

I did not always know any of this. At my first trunk show, I expected questions about the jewelry. Instead, collectors kept picking up the tokens and asking about the coins underneath — what is this? why don't these two quarters have the same back? (One was engraved on the obverse, the other on the reverse.) I did not always have the answer; I had to learn fast. Everything that follows is what I have learned since.

A retail jeweler can describe an engraving. They can tell you the gold weight of the bezel and the era of the chain. What they cannot do, without years of numismatic study, is tell you that the half-dollar under my menu is 90% silver, that it was minted in Philadelphia, that the Seated Liberty motif on the front had only fourteen years of production left when this piece was engraved.

The engraving is what most people see. The coin is what collectors read. I have spent the better part of a decade collecting them.

What follows is a guide to the second part.

The coin is the canvas

Every love token starts as legal tender — a circulating coin, taken out of someone's pocket or change purse, brought to a jeweler, and ground smooth on one or both sides to make room for the engraving. The engraver then hand-cut a name, a date, a symbol, a sentiment, or — once, that we know of — a French restaurant menu.

The choice of coin was rarely accidental. Some coins were chosen for size, some for cost, some for what was simply on hand. Each coin tells the careful reader a slightly different story. To understand a love token you have to know what was underneath the engraver's burin before he started.

The American silver dime

If there is one coin that defines the love token tradition, it is the American silver dime. The Liberty Seated dime (minted from 1837 to 1891) and the Barber dime that followed it (1892 to 1916) account for more love tokens than every other coin combined.

There are practical reasons for this. The dime was small enough to wear comfortably as jewelry — at roughly 18mm in diameter, it sat naturally as a pendant or as a link in a bracelet. It was 90% silver, which engraved cleanly and held a fine line. And it was affordable enough that a customer  in 1880 could take it to their jeweler to have it ground down and engraved without a hefty price tag.

There is a story I love about the peak of the love token era — and I cannot tell you whether it is actually true. The story goes that the United States ran short on dimes in circulation because so many were being taken out of pockets, ground smooth, and turned into engraved jewelry. Whether or not the supply actually buckled, the underlying premise is real: the practice had become so widespread that contemporary newspapers complained about it. The Mint kept striking. Customers kept commissioning.  Engravers kept engraving. Love tokens became, briefly, the coins' second life.

Even if the story isn't true, it deserves to be — which is, in a way, what love tokens are about. The coin in your hand may carry an engraver's true story, an owner's half-remembered story, or a story we tell each other because we want it to be true. All three are part of the tradition.

The Liberty Seated motif on the front of these dimes — the goddess Liberty seated with a shield and a staff — is one of the most beautiful designs ever to appear on American coinage. On most love tokens, the reverse of the coin (where the original denomination and wreath appeared) was ground smooth and engraved. The Liberty Seated face, more often than not, was left intact. That was deliberate. A collector handling one of these pieces today reads the engraving on one side and the original coin face on the other — both at once, both true.

Half-dimes, quarters, and half-dollars

The half-dime is the dime's smaller cousin. Tiny, almost charm-sized, and shorter-lived in production (it was discontinued in 1873). Half-dime love tokens are less common than dime tokens, partly because the coin was retired earlier and partly because the smaller surface gave the engraver less room to work. When you find one, it is almost always something intimate — initials, a name, a simple date — because that is all the canvas could hold.

Quarters and half-dollars are the opposite. Larger, more expensive, and more substantial. A quarter-based love token in 1880 was a meaningful gift in itself before the engraving was even cut. A half-dollar — my menu, for example — was a real outlay. The Seated half-dollar carries 90% silver in a 30mm diameter; that is significantly more silver content than a dime, and the engraver had a full canvas to work with. When you see a complex composition — eighteen lines of French script, a multi-figure scene, an elaborate monogram with foliate borders — it is almost always on a quarter or larger.

The British tradition

The Victorian love token impulse was an American one in scale, but Britain had its own version of the tradition. British shillings and sixpences from the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) sometimes appear engraved in the same manner as American tokens, though the style is often slightly different — a more restrained engraving, often a single name or initial rather than the elaborate symbolic compositions that American engravers favored.

There is also a pre-Victorian British tradition of bent coins — sixpences from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries deliberately twisted into an S-shape and given as love tokens or kept as pledges. These are older, rarer, and harder to find in any condition. They predate the engraved-token tradition but belong in the same emotional family: coinage turned into a vow.

The Victorian love token tradition extended well beyond the British Isles. Colonial currency — including silver rupees from British India — was sometimes engraved in the same hand-cut style, often by skilled engravers working in colonial cities. The piece in my collection is an Indian rupee with an interwoven monogram in the center and elaborate foliate scrollwork around the entire face. I had it set in a ruby bezel and gave it to my best friend several years ago. It is one of the few pieces in the archive that has left my hands and gone to live with someone I love.

The gold love tokens

Gold love tokens are the rarest category of the entire tradition. The reasons are practical and unromantic. Gold was expensive — a five-dollar half-eagle in 1880 cost what a labourer earned in two days — and most engravers worked in silver because silver was what their customers could afford. But the gold love tokens that do exist are some of the most extraordinary objects in the field, partly because of their rarity and partly because of the coins themselves.

American gold coinage in the nineteenth century was a small and peculiar world. The gold dollar — the smallest American gold coin, in production from 1849 to 1889 — came in three different sizes over its short life. All three are absurdly small by modern standards. The smallest, the Type 1 gold dollar, was just 13mm in diameter; you could hold ten of them in your palm without effort. It is difficult to imagine carrying these in a pocket as actual money, but Americans did. They were redesigned twice to make them slightly larger and less likely to be lost.

The most beautiful American gold coin of the era — by wide consensus among numismatists — was a denomination almost no one today has ever heard of: the three-dollar gold piece. It existed for a specific reason that says something about how the Mint and the Treasury thought in the 1850s. The price of a postage stamp had just dropped to three cents. The three-cent silver coin had been created to make buying a single stamp simple. Then in 1853, Congress and the Mint together decided that a three-dollar gold coin would make it equally simple to buy a full sheet of one hundred three-cent stamps in a single transaction. James B. Longacre, the Mint's chief engraver, designed it: Lady Liberty wearing a Native American princess headdress on the obverse, and on the reverse a wreath of corn, wheat, cotton, and tobacco — the four agricultural crops that defined American prosperity at midcentury. To distinguish it from the smaller $2.50 quarter eagle, Longacre struck it on a deliberately thinner planchet and gave it a broader diameter — 20.5mm against the quarter eagle's 18mm. The result is two coins of completely different proportions: the $3 broad and thin, the $2.50 small and thick. I make bezels for both. The difference in the hand is immediate.

The three-dollar piece was never widely used. It was discontinued in 1889. Total mintage across thirty-six years was barely over five hundred thousand pieces — fewer than a single year's worth of contemporary dimes. Love tokens engraved on three-dollar gold pieces are exceptionally rare and, when they appear, almost always reflect a commissioner who knew exactly what coin he was choosing.

The half-eagle ($5), eagle ($10), and double eagle ($20) follow the predictable pattern. Larger, more expensive, more substantial, and proportionally rarer as love token canvases. I have never seen a love token engraved on a double eagle, though they almost certainly exist somewhere in private collections. Even on a ten-dollar eagle they are extraordinarily rare — I have seen perhaps one or two over the course of a decade of collecting. The smaller gold pieces — gold dollars and half-eagles — are more reachable but still rare. If you find one with your initials, grab it.

A piece I am particularly proud of, made for one of our most devoted collectors, is a spinner pendant with a different gold love token on each face, set in an elaborate frame. The spinner mechanism lets the wearer turn the piece in her hand and read both sides — her initials on one face, her husband's on the other — while the birthstones of the whole family are set throughout the frame. It is the closest thing I have ever made to a literal embodiment of what this post is arguing: that the coin is half of the work, and the setting is the other half, and that the most extraordinary objects bring both halves into a single piece you can wear and turn and keep.

The strange and the wonderful

The archive in the early days, on the breakfast-room table, with Nyx on supervision duty. The pandemic had just begun. I had time and a lot of love tokens to organize.

Not every love token has initials. The tradition was broad enough, and human imagination strange enough, that engravers were occasionally asked to put unusual things on coins.

A few from the archive:

Pickles. A single word, on a silver dime, in a confident hand. I have spent years wondering who Pickles was — a beloved, a nickname, a private joke, a person whose actual name the engraver could no longer write without smiling. I will never know.

Excuse Me. Engraved across a coin face, no explanation. Love tokens were almost always made to commemorate something — a wedding, an anniversary, a child's birth, a departure, a declaration of love. Excuse Me fits none of those occasions. What precluded it?

The Lord's Prayer. The complete text, hand-cut into a small silver coin in a script so fine you can barely read it without a loupe.  I have many but this remains one of my favorites.  What makes this one extraordinary is what runs along the bottom: "H.B. Rutherford, Engraver, Baggot Terrace, Phoenix Park, Dublin." Love token engravers almost never signed their work — the tradition is one of anonymous craft. To find a signed piece, with the engraver's name and his Dublin address still legible on the coin, is genuinely rare. I have spent more time than I can account for wondering who H.B. Rutherford was, how many of these he made, and whether any of his other pieces are still out there somewhere, unrecognized.

Birds. The swallow was the most common engraved bird in the Victorian vocabulary, and probably the most prevalent bird in Victorian jewelry of any kind. Its symbolism echoed the shape of nineteenth-century life: long separations of lovers and families, divided by war and by commerce, and the swallow — which returns to the same nest year after year — standing for safe passage home. To give someone a swallow was to wish them back. Beyond the swallows, the engravers' birds get more particular the more you look. I have love tokens with doves, with swans, with cranes and herons — each a small portrait of a bird the commissioner chose for what it meant.

A poem in German. On a silver coin dated Weihnachten 1901 — Christmas 1901 — an entire verse hand-engraved in elaborate script, in German, across the whole face of the token. The translation runs roughly: "From your father's house where you dearly slept — hold firmly with your whole heart. Here are the strong roots of your strength. There in that remote country, you stand alone, a shaky reed, crumpled by every storm." It is impossible to read this token and not invent the rest of the story. Was the recipient an emigrant? A soldier? A son sent abroad for work or for safety? Whoever they were, someone at home wanted them to carry these words on Christmas Day, in a year that turned out to be the last Christmas of the nineteenth-century world.

And one engraved with a complete French restaurant menu, eighteen lines long, on the reverse of an 1877 Seated Liberty half-dollar — which is where this post began.

Why this matters

An early picture from my collecting days — all that I had at the time, laid out on a piece of cloth I was using to polish them before a trunk show. The Heavenly Vices archive now numbers in the thousands, organized in binders for quick retrieval when a collector reaches out. I keep this photograph because it reminds me how it began.

I have spent the better part of a decade collecting Victorian love tokens because every one of them is a small story I will never fully know. The names, the dates, the relationships, the meals at unnamed restaurants — almost all of that is lost. What survives is the object. The coin, transformed by hand into something a person wanted to carry.

Everything in this post is the cumulative knowledge I have built since that first trunk show. With every new denomination that lands on my desk, I learn a little more. The work may never end — and that is exactly as it should be, because this was never only a business. It is a conservation crusade and a complete labor of love.

Sometimes I get to recover what was lost. People have started calling me, only half-jokingly, the antique engraving whisperer. Collectors message me on Instagram with photographs of pieces they cannot read — a monogram they cannot resolve, a script they cannot decipher, a symbol they do not recognize. In 2019, at a show, a woman who already owns a few pieces from us brought me a bracelet she had inherited. Eight engraved 22-karat gold US coins, linked together, each one carrying interwoven initials in a deep, confident hand. An astonishing thing to inherit — and she had received the bracelet but not the story of whose initials it carried. Can you tell me? she asked. I could. I did.

That is, in the end, what this work is for. These objects outlast the people who made them and the people who first carried them, yet they remain legible if you know how to read them. Heavenly Vices is built on that legibility — on the conviction that an engraved coin in a stranger's hand is a story waiting for someone to recover it.

Whenever a love token lands on my desk, I wonder how a family could ever let it go. But I am glad to be their steward — the ones I find today and tomorrow, the ones I have held for years, and even the ones I have sent into the world as new love stories. I tell my collectors: should the day ever come when you want to part with your piece, I want to be the first to know. These tokens survived a hundred and fifty years only because someone, at every turn, chose to keep them rather than melt them down. That continues with me.

Because that is what these pieces do. Love tokens are love stories. We have spent a decade collecting them — and somewhere in the archive is the one that will begin yours.