Heads from the Royal Ontario Museum?

I'd like you to meet Wilhelm Kong von Wurttemberg.

I found the German royal, and about 50 other plaster discs like him, at a garage sale in April.

The owner sold me the lot for $10 - pricey by grunge queen standards but I'd like to think I paid for the story, too.

A gent in his 60s or older, the man who sold them to me told me his father found these mainly chipped discs at the CPR railway yards where he worked in the 1960s - they were destined for the trash.

Apparently they're rejects from a Royal Ontario Museum exhibition here in Toronto in the 1960s. That makes a certain amount of sense as some of the discs are identified with tags, like Wilhelm is, and there's writing on the back of a lot of them indicating the years they lived or ruled (Wilhelm was apparently the Wilhelm the 1st and he lived 1781-1864).

What I loved even more was the fact that this gent and his siblings, so the story goes, grew up playing with these head pieces. Apparently they pretended they were money!

I haven't verified his story but I love it all the same. Nor have I really taken a good look at all the scenes and heads on this dics, but there are Greek philosophers, other emperors and Greek and Roman Gods.

And I have NO idea how to display these flat coin-like discs, which range in circumference from the size of a large apple (that's Wilhelm, and he's the largest), to the size of a penny.

Any ideas???

I think it would be cool to put in a call to the ROM and see if it have any history on the exhibition.