I have 3 1934A $10 stars with the serials ending in 5,6 and 8 (not single digit serials, I wish). Almost consecutive. My question is, the face plates are E89, A89 and B89, and the back plates are 678,680 and 680, why does this occur on consecutive notes?
I believe this series was printed and distributed from the mid to late 30’s through the mid 40’s on 12-subject sheets. I’m guessing back plates were used randomly and face plates should have been alphabetically consecutive. Maybe @Numbers will see this thread and chime in.
They were printed in 12-subject sheets, yes. Also, the serialling worked very differently than it does today: the sheets were consecutive-numbered rather than skip-numbered. Nowadays, a pack of 100 consecutive notes come from 100 different sheets--the sheets are numbered in such a way that a stack of 100 sheets can be cut directly into a bunch of 100-note packs, with no need to sort the notes into order after cutting. So the top sheet of the stack might contain serial numbers 1, 101, 201, 301, and so forth. In the 12-subject era, the serialling was consecutive down each half of the sheet, so the sheet that contained serial number 1 (in position A) would also contain 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (in positions B through F). Most of the time, though, the other side of the sheet (positions G through L) would *not* get serials 7-12; those would be on the A-through-F side of the next sheet. The result is that if you get a pack of consecutive new notes, you get a cycle of plate positions that looks like either A-B-C-D-E-F-A-... or G-H-I-J-K-L-G-...; you don't generally get all twelve positions in the same pack. Six consecutive notes all come from the same sheet, so they all have the same face plate and back plate numbers. But whenever the position jumps from F back to A, or L back to G, you've switched to a new sheet, and the plate numbers may change. Most of the intaglio presses of that era used four plates in rotation, so you expect to see four different plate numbers (in a span of 24 notes) before they start to repeat. But the sheets were inspected after the back printing, and again after the face printing, and defective sheets were removed at each stage--so it's not unusual to see a sequence of plate numbers that doesn't stay perfectly in rotation. In the case of the OP's notes, the pile of sheets that went through the serialling press apparently had two sheets in a row with face plate 89, but they had different back plates, 678 and 680. So the positions and plate numbers of twelve consecutive notes would have been A89 / 678 B89 / 678 C89 / 678 D89 / 678 E89 / 678 F89 / 678 A89 / 680 B89 / 680 C89 / 680 D89 / 680 E89 / 680 F89 / 680 and then the next note after that would have been position A of the next sheet, and both the face plate and back plate numbers might have changed again (or might not). Clear as mud?
