Editorial notebook
Works of art or posters?

	AP The new nickel designs commemorate 200-year-old national events.
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Coins should be beautiful. We have a few handsome designs: the Kennedy bust on the half-dollar, Jefferson on the nickel. But much of American coinage is an attempt to cram too much detail into a small round space, an error that unfortunately is to be repeated with the new, commemorative nickels.

The United States Mint has announced two designs for the reverse of the nickel to commemorate the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark. For two years, these designs will replace Monticello, Jefferson's famous house, which for 65 years has been reproduced on the nickel as a blob that looks like the cross-section of a doorbell.

For 2004, the nickel will have two hands shaking, cut off above the wrist, floating in air. Above that is what looks like an ax and a golf club, crossed. Actually, it is an ax and a tobacco pipe.

In 2005, the nickel will have what looks like a Viking ship but is actually Lewis and Clark's keelboat. It is being poled up the Missouri River by six explorers the size of fleas.

We can do better than this. A century ago, we had an imaginative president who wanted coins to be beautiful. Teddy Roosevelt reached outside the bureaucracy to the top sculptors of the day. The results over the following 15 years were the most beautiful coins Americans ever made, such as the buffalo nickel (1913-1938), the Mercury dime (1916-1945) and the walking Liberty half-dollar (1916-1947).

The designs, particularly on the small coins, were simple. The images were instantly recognizable: a Native American man, Lady Liberty in a winged cap, an eagle on a rock. The images spread all the way to the coins' edge, so that the coin was dominated by the image and not the words. Most of all, these coins were beautiful. We remember them and collect them.

All this will matter more to us soon. In four years, Washington will have its own quarter. State-designed quarters are coming out in the sequence that the states and territories joined the Union. What kind of design will our state pick? Will it be crammed with the motifs of various parts of the state or will it be a coin to be held and treasured as its own work of art?

— Bruce Ramsey

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company