Pictures of a Distant Country: Seeing America Through Old Paper Money by Richard Doty (Whitman, 2013, 296 pages, $24.95) is a "coffee table" book replete with enlarged, full-color images of banknotes and other fiduciary paper from the 19th century. Dr. Richard Doty is the senior curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Numismatic Collection where he has had 27 years to study, organize, and display the tangible artifacts of our nation’s financial history. Unlike otherwise very nice but run-of-the-mill efforts that organize the subject either by denominations by year of issue, or by series of issue by denomination, this book honors the American people according to our occupations, families, classes and social statuses, as well as by our own views of whimsy, entertainment, accelerating technology, and national mythology. By the middle of the 1800s, paper money was established as the traditional medium of large-scale commerce. Paper money also achieved a consistency of design and presentation with “a central vignette, or more portraits to the left or right of the central scene, and a smaller representation bottom center.” These illustrations are now our windows to the past. Here we have images of how Americans perceived themselves, and (more importantly) how they wanted to be seen. Our nation expanded urban civilization, as it also was built by yeoman farmers, and, admittedly, by an agrarian society carried by slave labor. Industry and manufacturing play a large role, of course, as do shipping, railroads, and farming. In 2011, Richard Doty received the Huntington Award of the American Numismatic Society “in recognition of outstanding career contributions to numismatic scholarship.”
Yes, Dr. Doty passed away in 2013. A book he wrote for Scholastic in the 1970s is largely responsible for my collecting coins as a child. I met him at ANA in 2007 and thanked him for his influence. He smiled and said, "I am happy that my little book touched your life."
