Over the last few years, German producer, Le Grand Mint, has built itself a reputation for some quite unusual designs, full of detail, and quite different to almost everyone else. The silhouette ‘Evolution’ nature series, Liberty, Continents, and the long-running Algorithms, all bring a quirky sense of style to the market.

Here, we’re having a look at the newest 2024 releases from Le Grand, and there’s a good mix of bullion coins, and higher-end proof issues. Two of the four are additions to series that debuted last year, one is the launch release from the Lebanon Mint, and one is a fascinating look at a creation of the famous Swedish botanist, Linnaeus.

All of them should be available to order now, and they’re all supplied boxed with a Certificate of Authenticity. We’ll keep an eye on LGM in the future, and may look into a bullion profile for the Algorithms series at some point in the future.

EDIT: Mintages fixed on Durga issue

A warrior goddess in the Hindu religion, Durga represents the triumph of good over evil, fighting demonic forces threatening peace and balance. She is usually depicted as a beautiful, many-armed woman, carrying many weapons, and riding a tiger or a lion. Le Grand Mint has chosen a lion, and it’s fair to say they’ve nailed the depiction of Durga.

This isn’t just a simple view of the goddess and her moggie, there’s a very pretty background pattern, divided into arcing windows, and packed with fine detail. The employment of high-relief means that Durga isn’t lost in all that background, and the coin remains perfectly readable. The obverse employs a very similar background, with a central area set aside for the Cameroon coat-of-arms, and the inscribed issue details.

This looks like a full-on numismatic, but it is, in fact, a bullion coin, with a price to match. There’s a standard variant, but for around double the price, there’s the option of one with a dark ruthenium plating, and selective gilded highlights on both faces. That has a substantially smaller mintage. We only have renders at present, but we look forward to seeing actual coin images soon.

Herpeton is also the second in a series that debuted in 2023, this one called ‘Numiversum’. The concept here is nature, and its transition through time. Here we have a snake, weaving its way through multiple wormholes between dimensions, making the journey from obverse to reverse face. It’s a remarkably clean design, the mint successfully keeping the inscriptions off the artwork, and eschewing the coat-of-arms of Cameroon.

Again, we have a choice of finishes, with either a clean proof finish, or one sporting a gilded snake. Here, however, we also get a choice of sizes, with the coin coming in one-ounce, or two-ounce variants. The images we have at present aren’t great, but the 2023 coin, featuring a gecko, was beautifully done, especially in part-gilded form, and we expect nothing less here.

This one particularly caught my eye, for bringing attention to its highly unique subject, something we feel numismatics does so well. Carl Nilsson Linnaeus was an 18th century Swedish botanist, whose biggest claim to fame is formalising the Latin naming system we use to define species of living organism to this day. He initiated its use in botany, but it’s used for everything these days, from Tyrannosaurus Rex, to Homo Sapiens.

He also created the Horologium Florae (flower clock), a quite incredible attempt to design a clock that told the time by what plants had open or closed flowers. Linnaeus postulated a selection of plants for each hour, but obviously, it was hopelessly inaccurate, not taking simple things like weather, season, latitude, etc. It might have failed, but the idea behind it is absolutely fascinating.

The coin is divided into 12 segments, each delineated by a line with a clock number on it, and each segment filled with a colour image of the flowers he associated with each time. The border has the Linnaean names for the respective plants micro-engraved near the rim. The obverse depicts floral patterns in a more symbolic form, and it exhibits fine detail all over.

A rare coin issued for Liberia, it’s available in three sizes, with each carrying the same reverse face artwork, with the obverse differing only in some of the inscriptions, for obvious reasons. A neat idea, shining a light on something we bet most have no idea about. There are also some A1 posters floating around, that are signed by the artist, Dr. Carmen Testa, but you’ll need to ask your dealer about those,

With the increase in coins featuring Asian mythology, it’s of little surprise that Le Grand Mint wouldn’t have their own entrant into this market. They’ve gone with a clean, highly symbolic look at bringing two of the most iconic creatures in those cultures – the dragon, and the phoenix. It’s a traditional slender, winged dragon, and an intricate, flowing phoenix, interacting on the reverse face, occupying the central area, and surrounded by a clever border pattern that could be either feather or scale. High-relief is employed to enhance the readability of the design.

The obverse is a simple Public Seal of Niue, as this is the first release produced by Le Grand Mint for the Lebanon Mint. Available as a two-ounce proof coin, there is a variant that has dual-sided gilded highlights, with a mintage only half as high, but in other regards, they’re identical. As we said, a crisp, clean design compared to the current trend for extreme detail and complexity in this genre, and one that works well.