This website is ever-expanding and covers many areas of paranumismatica or exonumia, the only thing they have in common is that they are not made from metal, cardboard or ceramic – they are all made from a material that I refer to as ‘plastics’.

To avoid putting too much information on here I have links to various subjects, each one of which merits its own pages. The first section of the website is plastic play money or toy coins, the oldest of which seem to date from the 1950s. There are many metal play coins and paper play banknotes, they are excluded!

Because I am British, the majority of my collection is British but I have also listed those from other countries where appropriate. Many toy coins were issued in sets and I shall list and show images of sets where I know them.

Each individual item has its own reference number which is gives four bits of information, for example GBR063501 can be interpreted :

• GBR – this is the international abbreviation for the country, in this case Great Britain, for unknowns I have used XXX
• 06 – this refers to the set or group of coins
• 35 – this refers to the value within this set, so a number 35 from another set might have a different value
• 01 – this distinguishes varieties of the same coin. These are mainly colour variations.

 
Each coin is illustrated with its obverse and reverse where it is different and other details where known

• Country – we use the international three letter abbreviation code
• Currency – this is specific to each country, for example in the UK we have Pounds, Shillings, Pence and New Pence
• Value – this is a numerical value
• Obverse – this includes a description of the obverse (heads) of the coin
• Reverse – This includes a description of the reverse (tails) of the coin
• Diameter – in mm
• Colour – this is a difficult area as gold, brassy, copper, bronze are difficult to define so I have a master reference set here (linked to a page of images)
• Evans – The O in the Second ONG, David Evans, 2000 – the best hard copy catalogue of UK plastic toy coins
• Rogers – Toy Coins, David J de Sola Rogers, 1990 – catalogue of the Rogers collection of toy coins including all materials and countries
• KM – Many toy coins are copies of official coinage which can be found in the Krause publication World Coins
• Rarity – I have used a system from 1 to 10 whereby R1 is very common, and R10 is for exceptionally rare items.