In Robert Graves”™ poem “The Clipped Stater,” Alexander the Great gives up an empire to toil as a common soldier at a Mongolian outpost. For his labors, he”™s given the title object ”“ a defaced silver coin that nonetheless bears traces of his likeness, a symbol of all that has been lost and yet still remains.
Like Graves”™ Alexander, Charles Doyle knows something about coins, loss and reinvention. As a youth, he apprenticed with his uncle, Peter Rosa, whose New Rochelle company, Becker Reproductions Inc., sold nearly a quarter-million coins in more than 40 countries during the late 1960s and ”™70s. So good was Rosa in fact that he was commissioned by the American Numismatic Society to reproduce parts of its collection after it was robbed.
When his uncle died in the 1990s, Doyle collected the molds and models for the coins.
“Around 2003, I started playing around with making figures and started selling the coins my uncle gave me on eBay,” he said. “Then I started making coins.”
But it wasn”™t until he lost his job as an engineer with NXP Semiconductors in East Fishkill and his wife, Luisa, to breast cancer that Doyle turned to reproducing ancient and antique coins as a livelihood and a means of escape.
Today he is the president and metallic artist of Coin Replicas Corp., working out of his Putnam Valley studio to recreate coins that range from ancient Greek and Roman to post-colonial American.?According to the Hobby Protection Act passed by Congress in 1973, reproduced coins must be labeled copies on the front or back sides. One of the reasons Doyle said his uncle got out of the business was because he thought the labels marred the beauty of the coins. He preferred to place the word “copy” on the rim.
Why would coin collectors be interested in a copy?
“Because some of the coins they want are rare and expensive,” Doyle said. “Either they can”™t afford them or they can”™t get the real thing.”
An excellent illustration of this is the New England shilling, the first coin struck in British colonial America. It”™s nothing to look at, Doyle said, with the “NE” on the front and a “XII” on the back. But there are only five left in this country. Recently, one sold at auction for $418,000.
Rarity is only one thing that makes a coin valuable. Minting errors is another. Material also plays a role.
“Even if a coin is not valuable, the material is.”
Not long ago, Doyle received a Kennedy half-dollar that is worth $7 because of the amount of silver in it.
While Doyle is partial to American coins because of their history, he said that for sheer beauty no one can beat the ancient Greek drachms. These crystallize all the glory that was Greece ”“ the passion for the male and female figure, the sculpted lines, the dynamic use of drapery ”“ contained in something the size of a quarter.
“They are the most beautiful ever made.”
That would tend to disprove what poet Robert Graves once said: “There is no money in poetry. But then, there”™s no poetry in money.”
Doyle believes there is poetry in his coins, which he hopes someday to turn into jewelry. Certainly, there”™s money in that. Hellenistic coins of Alexander the Great ”“ which would”™ve been struck after his death in 323 B.C. ”“ might be worth a few hundred dollars each, given their plenitude, although they could go for much more at auction, according to J. Edward Taylor, author of the abstract “Valuing the Numismatic Legacy of Alexander the Great (University of California, Davis, 2007). But the same coin in a necklace or bracelet ”“ or even an artist”™s reproduction in a piece of jewelry ”“ can sell for several thousand dollars.
For Doyle, though, these coins have a price beyond money. The Alexander the Great tetradrachm from 297-281 B.C. depicts the Macedonian conqueror sporting the ram”™s horns of the god Zeus Ammon, a reference to the oracle he visited in the Libyan desert and the divinity conferred upon him there. A tetradrachm of Cleopatra ”“ the last Macedonian queen of Egypt and the keeper of Alexander”™s tomb in Alexandria ”“ confirms the fierce intelligence captured in Stacy Schiff”™s new biography.
“I wasn”™t a good student of history,” Doyle says. “But I enjoy history now.”
And he”™s hoping the story of the past will be the ticket to his future.
