Around The World of Money (Aesthetically Speaking)

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Around The World of Money (Aesthetically Speaking)

By Mark Leffler

"American money is the ugliest money in the world."

                            -   David Byrne "Talking Heads"

                Liner aphorism from

               "Stop Making Sense"

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Well, don't take that art school egghead's word for it.

A quick glance through the pages of The Art of Money

(Chronicle Books, $19.95, trade paperback original) and

a cursory glance at your own wallet's contents and

you will hold that truth to be self evident.

But hey, anyone who's traveled across the border into

Canada and exchanged currency knows that, eh? Dull greenbacks

with portraits of dead presidents looks pretty bland after

holding multicolored foreign dough in your hands.

Author David Standish has compiled an infotaining volume

exploring the history and design of money both foreign

and domestic. The book grew out of an August 1998 article

he did for Smithsonian Magazine, which prompted a flood of

mail from money collectors and globetrotters.

Stunningly beautiful photographs and graphic design augment Standish's

writing. The photography is credited to Tony Armour and Joshua Dunn. The

book is so beautiful it would bring tears of joy to Scrooge McDuck's eyes,

but that should come as no surprise since Chronicle Books (who also

published the recently released Beatle's coffee table companion to the

Anthology CD's and TV series) is renowned for their superior visual design.

The droll, humor laced commentary reads like taking a guided tour of a Wall

Street art gallery with a really smart, funny, well traveled pal.

Standish's writing has a breezy, "entre-nous" feel. The historical

footnotes and offbeat anecdotes date back to the origins of money:

"The first leader to put his own face on his coinage was Ptolemy I of Egypt

in 306 BC But then he had already declared himself a living god, so

technically it wasn't that much of a stretch."

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And you can just imagine his writer friends chuckling when he observes:

"The earliest notable western book printed on a press using moveable type,

of course, was Gutenberg's Bible, which appeared in 1455. His glorious

Bible doesn't bear his name because Gutenberg had borrowed money to get his

idea going and was unable to meet the terms of the loan, so his banker

partner foreclosed just before Gutenberg was ready to publish and turned

the operation over to his son-in-law. So the imprint is that of the

moneymen, not the original creative genius. Some things never change."

The reader also comes away with a treasure trove of trivia, like the fact

that the word salary derives from the Latin salarium or "salt money,"

attesting to the commodity's vital importance and rarity in days of old.

The assorted categories listed in the table of contents give you a good

idea of the tone. The "People" section contains subsections with titles

like "Queen Liz," "Tough Guys," "Topless Money" and "Just Folks." Under

"International Zoo" are found headings for "Birds," "African Safari" and

"It's a Cold-Blooded World."

In the original Smithsonian article that spawned the book, Standish

recalled traveling abroad and realizing that "money of some countries could

pass as art."

No question about it. An informal survey nominated the Netherland's

fifty-guilder note as the most beautiful piece of currency in the world. It

features a bee on a sunflower so yellow it would make Van Gogh envious. And

the bill is "detailed with a quintessentially Northern Renaissance

precision."

 On the other hand American greenbacks come in for a deserved ribbing.

"What must people think of the glowing eye balanced on a pyramid on the

back of the dollar bill? That the United States traces it's origins back to

visitors from outer space who purportedly founded Egypt?"

 Standish's sense of humor has a long and impressive past. While a

sophomore at Miami of Ohio in Oxford, Ohio in the early Sixties, he founded

and edited a college humor magazine, Plague (where a radical Marxist draft

dodger named P. J.  O'Rourke began slinging giggles a few years later).

He spent a good part of the 1970's and 80's as a writer and editor at

Playboy until leaving to pursue a freelance career. He was the first

full-time editor of Playboy Party jokes (as in: our unabashed dictionary

defines "bestiality" as a fowl ball), interviewed a slew of celebrities

such as Cher, Elton John and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. for the magazine, and was

the editor given the ambiguous honor of working with Hunter S. Thompson on

"The Great White Shark Hunt", which first appeared as a lengthy epic in

Playboy in the early 1980s. More recently he penned a ten-part history of

jazz and rock that ran in Playboy over three years in installments.

His friendship with Chris Miller (co-author of "National Lampoon's Animal

House," and "Multiplicity" and dozens of legendary sex, drugs and rock 'n'

roll stories in the Lampoon) led to a screenplay collaboration that

eventually became the 1986 tropical comedy "Club Paradise" starring Robin

Williams, Peter O'Toole, Twiggy and reggae singer Jimmy Cliff.

He travels extensively (well, DUH) and has written for Rolling Stone,

Esquire, Outside, Travel and Leisure, Geo, House Beautiful and Landscape

Architecture magazines. His writing has also appeared in The Chicago

Tribune travel section and Sunday Magazine and he has penned travel pieces

for The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and New York Daily News.

Standish also teaches in the Graduate Magazine Publishing program at

Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, in Chicago.

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