Today I got a 1988A $1 FRN in my till at work. It's the Fort Worth printing from Minneapolis I83513597A. The Standard Guide 8th Ed. lists this note at a whopping $450 in CU!! My note is not CU but why are they so valuable (or is it a misprint)? My note is F/VF.
Maybe Secretary of the Treasury Brady personally rolled around in them before releasing them for circulation??? Or maybe for those that collect by production facility, this note was one of few 1988A notes printed at FW and may have been printed before the facility was officially open?? There has to be a story to it somewhere.
The Azpiazu book also lists it at $450, so I doubt it's a misprint. The I..A block *was* printed mostly at Washington; only the last three runs, serials 76800001 to 96000000, were printed at Fort Worth. Still, that's almost 20 million notes, which isn't normally anywhere *near* scarce enough to fetch this kind of premium. Possibly the I..A Fort Worth printings were all released in out-of-the-way rural areas, so that few of them ended up being preserved in CU condition by collectors (that seems to be the story on the famous 1981 J..D block, for example, which goes for $2000 in CU). Or possibly only a few collectors were trying to collect the DC and FW pritnings separately at this early date, in which case they might've ignored the I..A FW notes because they already had I..A DC notes (which had been released about a year earlier). But these are complete guesses on my part...does anybody know for sure what the story is with this block?
