‘Adorned with endangered or extinct species in denominations such as $6.66, the real value of $10 with environmental costs factored in.’ Photograph: Joseph Sohm/Jonathan Franzen
© Naomi Klein and Kyo Maclear
'The Douglas, a currency conceived by Will Self and drawn by Martin Rowson. The note confers upon the bearer ‘the right to a ritual of some unspecified kind’, and bears a picture of the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, a quote from her book, Purity and Danger, and an assortment of indigenous peoples’ fiscal clutter, such as cowrie shells and spirit boards' Photograph: Will Self and Martin Rowson
‘A £50 note showing five noble beasts facing extinction in the wild, to remind users of the loss of natural wealth that no amount of money can replace.’ Photograph: John Gray
‘I thought the new money in Ireland might look a bit like this: which is to say like the old punt, but with Yeats’s line “We had fed the heart on fantasies” written up the lefthand side.’ Photograph: Anne Enright
‘It is designed for our new neo-Swiss, isolated, non-EU life. Deliberately ersatz, already grubby, the £ has been replaced by the more universal X.’ Photograph: William Boyd
'Money is, by general consent, one of humanity’s most remarkable inventions. Because it makes all goods interchangable – you can swap any one thing for any other thing, via an exchange of money – it makes all human goods soluble and fungible and interchangable. That’s what is wonderful about money, and what is terrible too. This makes it all the more amazing that, as James Buchan points out in his book Frozen Desire, Britain is the only country in the world that had money for a long period, under the Romans – and then stopped using it, for many centuries. It’s as if we said, ‘Money? Well, it’s alright, but it’s not really worth the faff, is it?’ When we did go back to using it, it was in the form of the Anglo-Saxon coins which are still, to me, the most physically appealing money this country has ever had Photograph: Ian Nicholson/PA Archive/Press Association
