Illegal quarters

Just when you thought it was safe to find a quarter in your pocket, like I did in a previous post, you may stumble onto a 'fantastic' illegal coin!

The movie 'Fantastic Four' (based on the comic) has a promotion out. 40 000 quarters were printed with some of the characters in the movie on them. Pretty cool promotion, until you find out that the US Mint actually said that the printing was illegal. All of the quarters used were state quarters for California, and about 800 of the promotional coins have been released in every state.

(And if you're a keen collector, you can submit your find of the Fantastic Four coin to win a private screening of the film!)

Read more about it here.

And while we're on the topic of coin collectors, I stumbled onto Coin Collector, which has lots of useful information for the numismatist (new word for the day! I promised Taki I'd stop using it; she thinks it's a naughty word :P ). Plus there's a coin trivia day each week, where you have to really know your coin stuff to get the answers right!