|
Serial Numbers Play Major Roles on Notes
 | By Neil Shafer, Bank Note Reporter
June 29, 2009 |
If we even bother to think about it, most of us take for granted that notes have serial numbers. Of course, those individuals collecting and studying the vast field of world notes know there are many instances where notes totally lack a serial number, but such pieces often have other numeric symbols accounting for them in some way.
A significant number of collectors take part in the fun and challenge of locating special numbers such as radars (those reading the same forward or backward), solid numbers (with all numerals being the same), low numbers, especially those with that ever-desirable numeral 1, mistakes such as mismatched numbers, stuck digit printers, and others. But that is only a small part of the true story of the importance of these seemingly innocuous additions to so many notes from everyplace.
It happens that serial numbers are used in a number of ways that may be surprising to many collectors. To begin with, quite a number of countries indicate replacement notes through some alteration of serial numbers on their paper currency. Changes in serial number appearance include a star in place of a letter, a special combination of letters or a particular letter block, and the deletion of a letter either at the beginning or end of the number. Such pieces are often eagerly sought by a host of enthusiasts, and they often will sell for much higher prices than their normally numbered counterparts.
Some places identify the year of issue of a particular note through its first two numerals - see issues from West Africa and Switzerland. Sometimes serial numbers also include a series designation; in such cases the numbers appear to be much longer than one would expect if only the actual number was involved. You can see good examples of such long numbers on notes from Brazil and Peru.
How many times does a serial number have to appear on a given note? I know of no set figure, but you can find notes with this characteristic showing as many as five or six times. Seems like a bit of overkill, doesn't it? This feature is to be found on issues from some of the large Hong Kong banks, also pieces from Belgian Congo dating from the 1940s.
Another very important aspect of serial numbers has to do with their use of some specific range or a special series designator. At times these characteristics give the note in question a completely different history than its ordinary counterpart. Some great examples of such an occurrence is seen in certain issues ostensibly from French Equatorial Africa made during World War II. Their serial numbers and prefix letters show them to be emissions made for use in the colonies of Reunion and St. Pierre. As such they command a much greater premium than ordinary pieces that look exactly the same.
Another group of wartime issues, now widely known, has to do with the Bureau of Engraving and Philippine Treasury Certificates dated 1936 and 1941. The exact story of these very special printings first came to my attention as far back as the late 1950s, during the years I spent in the Washington, D.C. area.
I had been assigned to join the Air Force Symphony stationed at Bolling Air Force Base. My time of service there was from September 1955 to August 1959. The rehearsal and performance schedule left me plenty of time to pursue a master's degree in music plus being able to spend many hours of intensive research at the National Archives and the Bureau of Engraving.
That research concentrated mostly on a search for any and all information I could find relative to Philippine coins and paper money made during the years that country was under the protection of the United States, 1898 through 1946. What I found was a literal treasure trove of material on both these aspects, with each eventually becoming a separate book fully covering all the details I had uncovered.
The letters and documents relative to the paper currency issues were voluminous at the Archives, where I first went to do the needed searching of the files. A problem developed when files dated 1937 and later came up marked SECRET, and I was not allowed to gain access to any later data. I felt that in all likelihood that was going to be the end of what had been very successful work thus far, but even so I did visit the Bureau of Engraving just to make sure.
To my tremendous relief the files at that office were totally unrestricted, and indications were that they proceeded all the way through World War II and the eventual end of U.S. rule over the Philippines in 1946. I was flabbergasted but did not let on how delighted I was - I just plowed in to those files with all the energy I could muster. And boy, did it pay off!
I recall literally stumbling onto the story about wartime printings, with details indicating exactly which notes were prepared and why they were made. In 1943 there arose a need to provide currency to some Philippine guerrilla units, and the idea was to prepare the notes in such a manner that they would simulate used currency. Exactly 300,000 of one-peso, 120,000 of five-pesos and 60,000 of 10-pesos notes were processed by the Bureau of Standards, undergoing a tumbling with floor sweepings, dirt, coffee grounds and various other materials. All of these were dated Series of 1941, the last date used before the war began. They were then dropped as needed.
Then, in 1944, there were two instances where special notes were made. The first group was composed of notes series dated 1936 in denominations of five, 10, 20, 50 and 100 pesos. These were apparently distributed as deemed necessary, and they were not processed.
The second special printing of 1944 used only one-, five- and 10-pesos notes, once again series dated 1941. These pieces were to comprise what became known as Naval Aviators' Emergency Money Packets. Each packet contained a face value of 100 pesos (40 of one peso and four each of five and 10 pesos), all housed in a waterproof little brown bag. Five thousand such packets were prepared.
Some notes from these special printings are available at various times on the numismatic market. Of the processed pieces dated 1941 and issued in 1943, the one-peso note can be found on occasion. As for the other two values, to my knowledge a five-peso example is reported but not confirmed, and I know of only a single 10-peso from this group, so these are of obvious rarity.
The first 1944 printing (dated 1936) is represented in collections by the three lowest values; the five and 10 pesos are occasionally offered, the 20 rarely. I have never seen any example of the two highest denominations in any collection or dealer's stock.
All three values of the Naval Packet notes are represented as single items in collections, with the one peso being the most frequently seen of any of the wartime printings. Both higher values are quite scarce, the 10 pesos especially so. Only a single intact packet is known today.
The kicker here, as you might have already surmised, is that ALL of these very special pieces can be easily identified only because of their particular serial numbers. This information has been an integral part of the catalog listings for a number of years.
German AMC Mark Currency
As obviously important as some of the above serial number situations are, there is one instance where the right serial number at exactly the right time served to help explode an old wives' tale about a particular Allied Military Currency issue that was literally a sacred cow for many years. I refer specifically to the time-honored four-zone theory having to do with the distribution method for German AMC.
The four Allied powers that ended up with zones of occupation in defeated Germany were the United States, England, France and the Soviet Union. I do not know how or why this four-zone theory developed, but here it is in a nutshell: notes issued by the French had serial numbers beginning with 00; those used by the British had a serial number that began with a single zero; those for the U.S. had numbers beginning with the numeral 1; those for the Soviets had numbers starting with a hyphen. No reasonable explanation for such a division seemed to exist. It was an accepted fact that the first three groups were printed in the United States and the fourth in Europe by the Russians.
In 1968, while I was at Western Publishing Co. and the Whitman Numismatic Journal was in its final (fifth) year of publication, Ken Bressett and I decided to do a little background work on this puzzling situation. Our aim was hopefully to prepare an article for the Journal on a subject we thought would be of wide enough interest to publish, covering Allied Military Currency issues for Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.
A couple of years earlier, Ken had discovered some strange little markings on a number of AMC issues. It was the eventual confirmation by officials that these were actually printers' marks (not unlike mintmarks on coins) that ultimately paved the way for the accomplishment of some really meaningful research in this area.
We had no idea what kind of information we might find, nor its quantity or importance to the field. It was going to need some months of fact-finding and we had to take it one step at a time in order to be sure of any conclusions we might be able to come up with.
Concerning the German AMC issues, we first obtained data about the U.S. printer, and found it to be the Forbes Lithographic Corp. of Chelsea, Mass. Its printer's mark turned out to be a stylized F in the border of each note (in several locations, depending on denomination). We located the amounts printed by Forbes of each value of German AMC, as follows:
Denom. Amounts printed
½ mark 75,448,000 notes
1 mark 114.296,000 notes
5 marks 75,896,000 notes
10 marks 77,800,000 notes
20 marks 75,544,000 notes
50 marks 61,120,000 notes
100 marks 48,084,000 notes
1000 marks 4,532,000 notes
Applying the four-zone idea and taking the one mark as an example, notes numbered from 000000001 to 009999999 were attributed to the French Zone; those with numbers from 010000000 to 099999999 belonged to the British Zone; notes starting at 100000000 to highest were for the U.S. Zone; any notes with numbers starting with a hyphen belonged to the Russian Zone. It was also known that replacement notes for U.S. printings were designated by numbers beginning with a hyphen, thereby supposedly making them identical to Russian-printed notes and indistinguishable from them. The overall system for assigning notes in this way remained convenient, and all catalogers and dealers used it in this manner.
The next step was a close examination of a large sampling of German AMC encompassing all denominations and serial number differences as noted above. We found that all U.S.-printed notes did indeed have the F mark; that notes supposedly for the U.S. Zone with the No. 1 designator came with or without the F mark; that notes with numbers beginning with the hyphen also came with or without this printer's mark.
For some unexplained reason, notes for the U.S. Zone were always quite difficult to locate, and in some instances a particular denominations had not even been reported. This seemingly made no sense, because the U.S. Zone would have needed a full complement of notes since all U.S. military personnel were paid in AMC marks.
None of the totals printed by Forbes exceeded 100 million except in a single instance, that produced for the one-mark denomination. Did this mean the only notes to be used in the U.S. Zone would consist of only 14,296,000 of the one mark? Such a conclusion was not only inconceivable, it had to be a totally false assumption on its face.
Some anomalies concerning the French Zone also became apparent. It would have meant that the numbering system automatically limited all "French Zone" notes to totals under 10 million for each value. Additionally, this zone was the poorest of the four. Why then would the French Zone have been the only one to place an order for 1,000-mark notes?
Another strange set of facts: all the German AMC pieces are dated 1944, yet the French Zone was not even created until the Yalta Conference in February 1945. According to official records, the last shipment of German AMC took place Oct. 13, 1944. Does this mean that all notes starting with the 00 were segregated months earlier awaiting a possible decision about such a zone? Hardly likely.
Our conclusion at this point was that all notes beginning with double or single zero were simply part of the normal numbering progression. U.S.-printed notes could not have any correlation to any specific zone of occupation.
We next turned our attention to those notes with numbers higher than 099999999 that had formerly been assigned to the U.S. Zone, also those notes beginning with the hyphen that were all believed to have been Russian printings. It was immediately apparent that most notes for the Russian Zone did not have the F printer's mark.
We found information to the effect that all printing plates were first made without any identifying marks, and that Forbes, not the Bureau, added the F only to plates used in the U.S. by them. The Bureau supplied the Soviets with glass positives from which printing plates were made, and the F was not on those positives.
The Bureau also gave actual examples of German AMC to the Russians. Evidence indicates that these were Specimen notes with lower numbers beginning with a hyphen, rather than pieces with regular numbers - and because they were made in the United States they also contained the F printer's mark. These features are characteristic of the replacement notes from the German AMC series. Additionally, all known Specimens of German AMC have exactly the same features.
We found the starting serial numbers for the Soviet printings. As they were able to print as many notes as they wished, their totals are known to have exceeded by around double the amount printed by Forbes. Now here's the crux of the matter: because all the pieces given to them had the hyphen before the number since they were replacement notes, and the Soviets did not realize that such was the case, they used a hyphen for their initial note issues because they thought it was a normal part of the serial number. Inasmuch as the Soviet-printed notes with a hyphen were made without the F printer's mark, they could now be properly identified as Russian regular issues and not U.S.-printed replacements.
But what about notes without the F but with serial numbers higher than -99999999? Here are those starting serial numbers for notes printed by the Russians, along with the highest observed serial number for each denomination to date as shown in World War II Remembered:
Denom. Starting no. Highest seen
½ mark -50,000,001 -54,494,827
1 mark -50,000,001 115,892,681
5 mark -50,000,001 107,233,635
10 mark -50,000,001 110,070,915
20 mark -50,000,001 108,998,547
50 mark -40,000,001 111,558,993
100 mark -35,000,001 120,894,017
1000 mark -25,000,001 -31,180,737
The most significant observation from the above numbers is that all except the lowly ½ mark go well above the -99 range. What the Russians did when they wanted to go higher than -99 was to discard the hyphen and proceed to the 100 million numbering to arrive at the high figures you see. The most important fact to remember about these is that none of them carry the F printer's mark.
When you study both sets of numbers together, you can see that the only notes that overlap are the one-mark since those were the only ones made over 100 million by both the Russians and Forbes. But in order to solidify our work, we felt that if possible we had to find a Russian-printed one mark with its serial number higher than the 114 million range of the Forbes printing.
There were numerous instances where the numbers on one-mark notes with or without F overlapped, and we were sure by then that all the No. 1 notes for all values except the one mark were Russian printings, but we had not seen any one mark that would prove the point.
All this research was being done during 1968, and even as late as July I had reported the first instance I knew of where a "U.S.-Zone" 10 mark was found. In fact, I showed it in a column I wrote for the Journal. Little did I realize that we were at that very moment disproving the very thing I was reporting.
That summer, most likely at some large convention I was attending, the event that for me totally validated our research was my serendipitous discovery in some miscellaneous 10-cent box of the German one-mark AMC note with that special high serial number we needed so badly. Its number was 115 892681 and you see it as my "Note of the Month." Its total is still the highest known Russian printing for this denomination, and of course it lacks the F printer's mark. It is over 1.5 million more than the Forbes total, and it served to prove our point conclusively as it allowed us to finish off the four-zone theory once and for all. Our findings on Austrian, French, German, Italian and Japanese AMC appeared in the November 1968 Journal, taking practically the entire issue.
I recall our telling hobby leaders at the time about what we had discovered, also their reaction of absolute disbelief and refusal to accept this data. Fortunately that attitude did not last long, and today everything we found is part and parcel of all listings of these pieces everywhere.
I'll close by mentioning a few other instances where the serial numbers have influenced collecting patterns: errors involving numbers and numbering machines, differing styles on the same issues, sometimes representing specific printers, color variances that may designate some separate printing, handwritten numbers, and others. The area offers virtually unlimited opportunities for both discovery and pure enjoyment. Illustrated are just a few of the many ways serial numbers demonstrate their importance to collectors. Enjoy!
Add to: del.icio.us digg
With this article: Email to friend Print
Something to add? Notice an error? Comment on this article. | |