Many types of merchants found reason to use tokens in West Virginia. General merchandise stores often issued them in the same denominations as official United States coins. In saloons and other establishments where alcoholic beverages were sold, they were handy for making change or for partial payment of drinks. Bakeries, billiard parlors, dairies, drug stores, clothing stores, and hotels, were among the numerous types of business establishments that profited from the usage of tokens. Most had some sort of value, expressed either as a monetary denomination or some specific "good for."

For the most part, merchant tokens were issued in small quantities. A mintage of a thousand pieces might be considerably large, and in some instances as few as a hundred pieces of a token were struck. So, it is easy to see why so many of the tokens cataloged in this book are rare, in many cases only a single example being known to exist.

This book catalogs all those merchant trade tokens known to the author which were in use from the end of the Civil War to the early 1960s. It does not include coal mine company store tokens, as they are cataloged elsewhere. Transportation tokens are not listed for the same reason, as are Civil War store cards. Items such as car wash tokens, parking tokens, wooden nickels, and food stamp tokens are excluded, since most of them are of fairly recent issue. No plastic tokens are listed, as they are also modern. Encased cents which have a "good for" value expressed in their inscriptions are included; those which are strictly advertising in nature are not.

Binding: Hardcover

Edition: 1st

Publication Date: 2009

Size: 8.5x11