Something About Pawnbrokers

Pawn your credit and your honour.

Today is National Pawnbroker’s Day. As many pawn shops as I see around town I have to laugh a bit when not a one of them features the iconic symbol of the trade. Most pharmacies in town feature the mortar and pestle – so go figure. The pawnbroker's symbol is three spheres suspended from a bar:

The symbol may be indirectly attributed to the Medici family of Florence, Italy, owing to its symbolic meaning in heraldry. This refers to the Italian region of Lombardy, where pawn shop banking originated under the name of Lombard banking. It has been conjectured that the golden spheres were originally three flat yellow effigies of bezants, or gold coins, laid heraldically upon a sable field, but that they were converted into spheres to better attract attention.

Pawnbrokers only figure into one of Bellairs’s books, specifically The Eyes of the Killer Robot, and even Bellairs knows to include the symbol:

Around ten thirty the next morning, the two boys and the professor were standing outside of Chigwell's Pawn Shop. Three golden globes hung from a bracket over the door, and propped up behind the plate-glass display window were two guitars, a saxophone, a velvet-covered board with several antique watches hanging on it, and an old cavalry saber.

I wonder if anyone has ever pawned a set of the globes? What other trade symbols can you think of besides mortar and pestles, golden globes, and striped barber poles?