I have been collecting coins since the early 1960's. As such I noticed that coin books catalog coins by type and under those listings are the dates and sub-types. I started collecting paper by the late 1960's specializing in German currency. My first German book and still my favorite is the Jaeger-Haevecker German currency book which lists German notes in the coin style format. Then in the 1970's Krause Publications started publishing the Pick books. The Pick cataloging system lists notes by issue date instead of type so if a German note type has five different issue dates it also has five different catalog numbers which never made sense to me. Is there a reason for this?
I'm not sure what Krause's rationale was- maybe it worked better for whatever system they were using. But I agree with you that finding the same note type with five different numbers might be confusing. I don't collect paper money. Maybe it's important to separate the issue dates the way the Krause/Pick catalogs do, for the sake of differing rarities and/or census reasons? I haven't owned a Pick catalog for nearly 30 years, so I'm not really familiar and I'm just babbling here. Will see myself out, now...
