DANIEL WEBSTER / Coins Dig in the sofa cushions -- it just might be worth it

The urge to paints coins defines gilding the lily. Still, there's a buck to be made by coloring coins, and many private firms offer colorized U.S. coins -- often with the claim that they are more valuable than the original mint product.
The U.S. Mint can only warn those who paint coins that they are skating close to violating counterfeit laws.
A Michigan firm offering U.S. coins adorned with American flags and soldiers is the latest to draw a warning. The mint wants it clear that the colorized coins are not a mint product.
Several states are looking into the possibility that technicolor coins, sold with the implication that they are more valuable than mint products, may constitute deceptive advertising.
Real collectors take their coins neat.
Dark and stormy stories
Storytellers from lands as varied as Australia and Zimbabwe gather in July in Whitehorse, Yukon. The far north of Canada brings out the most fantastic and sobering tales in a three-day festival that has come to be the Yukon's summer highlight.
Storytelling includes music, dance, puppetry, drumming and theater.
The festival is the subject of a 50-cent silver coin struck in the provincial festival series by the Royal Canadian Mint. The new coin shows the raven, the symbolic guardian of stories and collector of glitter.
Three other festivals will be featured on coins to be issued in June. Individual coins cost $14.95 and the full 13-coin set will sell for $170.45.
Orders go to the mint at (800) 268-6468 or by Internet at www.mint.ca.
Out of the past
Auctions held by European dealers remind collectors of the age, deep history and eternal striving for beauty in coinage. Renegade states, brief monarchies and stable governments all staked out their places in history with silver and gold portraits of rulers and church princes. The variety and number of mints can be daunting to collectors in the United States accustomed to dealing with a flow of history notable for its steadiness.
The auction May 27 in Munich, scheduled by Numismatik Lanz, is one of those textbook offerings, showing on coins historical upheavals and golden eras going back to the Middle Ages. Collectors can bid on pieces from the 14th century, coins from Balkan states no longer in the atlas, pieces marking the weddings that united tiny principalities, and paper money issued by the Allies in the 1940s when real money was hard to find.
Catalog entries can be seen at www.Lanz.com.
XDaniel Webster is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.