Rare Notes (Circulation Finds!)

WOW! That solid 8's find is crazy. From the wear it passed many hands and not once did it fall in a collectors hands, pretty nice story that it feel in the right hands in the end.

7787878 is nice number (perhaps a fancy number) but not a "repeater."

I will start a new thread for what I think are "Fancy Numbers"

It is almost impossible to know exactly how many of a prefix were printed & released. They may have been printed but whether the entire range of notes were actually released (or not/or just partial release) is impossible to determine- unless you have a number of "brickers," collectors, and interested parties actually submitting prefixes & serial numbers (SN data with the back/front position numbers).

We had that going at the Canadian Paper Money Forum (CPMF) with their Serial Number Data Base (SNDB) before it shut down. It had the ranges (like the M/C & M/P $10 FTH change-overs) & the number of notes that were actually entered would be displayed. It wasn't a foolproof system (people may not have been entering as consistently as we'd hope) but at least it was bona-fide database that helped us have a better picture of what was actually being released into circulation.

In the case of the M/C FTH (can't remember exact number) around 10 notes were reported nationwide (whereas well over 250 for the M/P FTH prefix).

This is not new: 10 (or less) were reported for $100 EKZ, $50 AHK& $20 BSW. It has also happened several times before with various Journey prefix denominations (especially change-overs such as 2004 $5 HOH; 2011 $5 HAE-HAL; 2003 BEK, BEL & BER). Low print/release ranges seem to occur most often at the wind-down stage of a series (the last prefixes) but can occur randomly too.

The data collecting just started (in ernest) with the discovery of the "Double Denomination" wrong paper error which happened to Journey $10 with the BTT & BTU prefixes (E6 in Charlton). The CPMF set up a wiki site which had registries of this info (very interesting stuff- if you like that sort of thing). Other members (who had access to the data) had noted small ranges printed for the $20 ERG prefix and I (& a few other CPMF members) were seeing 2 ranges for the GHD M/C $50 which is also a tough prefix to find with the M/C prefix (harder in lower numbers than higher ranges). It appears as if that $50 also has different Front & Back position numbers than all the rest of the $50 suggesting a separate printing process occurred. So while the BOC numbers state there were 4.9 M notes of the GHD M/C (Macklem-Carney) initial prefix printed, it is more likely that only a fraction of those were actually printed/released.

looks like it pays to drink

Not sure if these would be considered rare with 20,000 printed however I did have three and was able to sell one on e-Bay for $130.00 about a year ago.
If you look closely you can see a second note peeking out from behind the first it's the next consecutive note.
I kept these more because they were the first issue and I've tried to collect the first and last issues of each series along with date or signature changeovers.

Cheers, Bill

HB is referring to the $50's as an insert replacements BC-72aA (range:1.29-1.31 M)
-They are a nice find and I'm surprised you found them in circulation (in that condition).

When I was collecting paper notes I used to go to the paycheck loan places and bet them they couldn't find a note I was hunting for and if they did I would give them an extra $10.00 over face value.

I got lots of neat notes not all in uncirculated but some where very close. I got lots of the old bird series notes BC-57c $10.00 BEF in circulated condition and sell them on ebay for double my money this was before all the mint notes started showing up early on the release of them.