500 Schilling Book Printer

The 500 Schilling silver commemorative series ran through the final years of Austria's pre-euro currency, and this 1998 issue honoring the early book printing trade arrived just four years before the schilling was retired permanently. Austria had a legitimate claim to the subject: the region's printing houses, particularly in Vienna and the monastic centers of the alpine lands, were among the earliest north of the Alps to adopt Gutenberg's movable-type technology in the 1460s and 1470s.

The .925 fineness places it in the sterling range rather than the .900 fine standard used in earlier Austrian silver coinage.