Until 1789, the best-made and most carefully designed official objects coming from the sophisticated capital of Europe's largest kingdom were not French coins, long struck by hand at Paris' medieval royal mint. They were instead the millions of royal medals and official tokens called jetons, mostly in silver and all with royal effigies on front, produced at a state-of-the-art factory known as the Monnaie des Médailles, built in 1552 on the western tip of the Ile de la Cité and moved across the Seine to the Louvre in 1609. After 1663, their designs and inscriptions were minutely supervised by France's Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which survives today.
Composed by a retired social historian of pre-Revolutionary French science and seasoned collector of French jetons (x–xi), this physically beautiful book, produced with exquisite attention to detail (including a red satin bookmark), curiously resembles the elegant objects the history of...