I happened to spot this note on Lyn Knight. The name of the bank is printed vertically over the left hand side. This was printed after it left the BEP right? The serial number on the left is also blue. Not black or red! http://lynknight.com/ShowAuctionDetails.Asp?auction_Id=231990
The red overprint of the bank name must have been done privately, yes. The blue Treasury serial was normal for a while; the serialling of the Original Series Nationals was a bit weird. The first million sheets got red serials without letters. The next million got blue serials without letters. At that point the BEP realized that they couldn't keep switching colors every million sheets, so they introduced prefix letters instead; the third million sheets got red serials beginning with 'A', the fourth million with 'B', and so on. So if you look this note up in a census, the serial will be recorded as "143939 blue". That's because there was also a 143939 in the previous (red) block.
The overprint requires perfect alignment. That must have been a delicate thing to do. The original printing had to be right on to marriage the two so perfectly. Not to mention the prior cutting operation, if the second printing was done as a single note from sheets.
Thank you for the historical information! Then what's this? According to this number should be red? And it is blue.
Okay, you're really paying attention, aren't you? This note would be from one of the nonstandard sheet combinations, which used their own independent serial sequences. Large-size Nationals were (usually) printed in sheets of 4 notes, but it was common for a single sheet to contain a mix of denominations. The vast majority of $1 Nationals were printed on sheets of $1-$1-$1-$2. But individual banks could order different combinations if they wanted to; both $1-$1-$1-$1 and $1-$1-$2-$2 were used by small numbers of banks. My earlier post, that you quoted, is talking about the serialling of the $1-$1-$1-$2 sheets. This note must come from a sheet of one of the other combinations. Off the top of my head, I don't know which combination this bank used. If you look up the bank in Kelly, it'd have that information. Or if you really want all the gory details of the serialling systems, get the Huntoon book.
Once again, I apologize for my English! I use autotranslator. Here is what was written: "...the third million sheets got red serials beginning with 'A...". This note from is "the third million sheets", but the serial number in her BLUE (left).
Many thanks for the answer! I was confused is the color of the serial number. After all, it should be red! And how to explain the blue numbers on this note? It is not only the letter but also the suffix is?
More detail (from the Huntoon book): The "standard" sheet combinations for Original Series NBNs were 1-1-1-2, 5-5-5-5, and 10-10-10-20. Each of these used the block sequence described above: plain red numbers for the first million sheets, plain blue numbers for the second million, red numbers with prefix 'A' for the third million, and then through the alphabet from there. So the block sequences were: 1-1-1-2: plain, plain, A, B, C, D, E 5-5-5-5: plain, plain, A, B, C, D, E, H, K, L, N, P, U 10-10-10-20: plain, plain, A, B, D A variety of other sheet combinations were in use, but they were all used by far fewer banks than the big three. As a result, all of them were still using serials in the first, plain-red (or occasionally blue!) block long after the big three combinations were into prefixed serials. Eventually, prefixes were added to all of these serial blocks as well, so that all serials would have a consistent look. These prefixes did not generally begin at 'A', and do not seem to have been chosen in any particular pattern--and in a few cases they weren't even letters: 10-10-10-10: plain, Z, W 10-10-20-20: plain, Y 10-10-20-50: plain, T 10-20-50-100: plain, R 10-50-50-100: plain, A 20-20-20-20: plain, X 20-20-20-50: plain, V 20-20-20-100: plain, U 20-20-50-100: plain, W 50-50: plain, B 50-100: plain, (parentheses) 50-50-50-100: plain, P 100-100: plain, N 500: plain, M 500-500-500-500: plain, (parentheses) 500-1000: plain, K 500-500-500-1000: plain [not used after 1866, so never got prefixed] 1000: plain, L 1000-1000-1000-1000: plain, (parentheses) Finally, the last few combinations were introduced after prefixes were already in use, so they never used plain numbers at all: 1-1-2-2: A 20: X 20-50: K 50: A 50-50-100: A So your $20 note is from a rather unusual printing of just a single $20 note per sheet. Only something like 35,000 of these were printed, according to the book. Believe it or not, I'm actually *still* leaving out quite a lot of complications in the way the Original Series serialling worked. If you enjoy these sorts of details, you definitely want to get hold of the Huntoon book, because I don't have time to retype the whole thing here....
Sumptuously! Thank you so much, dear Numbers! All this information I have very carefully studied. I have a book Kelly, but the book is not Hunton. I will try and buy it.
