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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 412236, member: 11668&quot;]We need to be careful about terminology, though.&nbsp; Part of the reason some people don&#039;t see what&#039;s interesting about short runs is that some people aren&#039;t understanding the word &quot;run&quot; correctly....</p><p><br /></p><p>These days, the BEP prints most currency in runs of 200,000 sheets (6,400,000 notes).&nbsp; The $50&#039;s and $100&#039;s use runs of 100,000 sheets (3,200,000 notes) instead.&nbsp; Stars of all denominations also use the 100,000-sheet standard runs; but with stars, even shorter partial runs are often printed.</p><p><br /></p><p>So in Daggar&#039;s example of the Atlanta $1&#039;s, the July 2007 serial range he listed isn&#039;t a print run.&nbsp; It&#039;s actually 39 print runs, each comprising 6,400,000 notes.&nbsp; And if there were 39 runs printed for one district in one month, you can see that collecting an entire series by print runs would be a substantially larger challenge than almost anyone really wants.&nbsp; For example, there were a total of 1215 print runs in the 2003A $1 series, not counting stars and collector-only issues.</p><p><br /></p><p>Star notes, though, are printed in much smaller quantities.&nbsp; That same 2003A $1 series had just 19 star runs printed, a number which far more collectors are willing to put up with.&nbsp; So there&#039;s actually a significant minority of collectors who try to obtain one star from each run, rather than just one from each district.&nbsp; Since it&#039;s only the star notes that are typically collected by print run, the comparisons some folks have made between regular notes and star notes rather miss the point.</p><p><br /></p><p>Another factor that comes into play is the way the BEP chooses serial numbers when it prints a partial run of star notes.&nbsp; Every star run is assigned a full 3,200,000 serials, even if it doesn&#039;t use them all.&nbsp; So if run #1 is only 640,000 notes long, then serials 00640001 through 03200000 will just be skipped, and run #2 will still begin at 03200001.&nbsp; As a result, it&#039;s easy to keep track of which print run your note comes from: Any serial between 06400001 and 09600000 is from run #3, for example, no matter how long runs #1 and #2 were.&nbsp; Thus there *is*, in fact, a way to distinguish print runs just by looking at the notes.</p><p><br /></p><p>Okay, so that&#039;s why the idea of collecting stars by print run isn&#039;t quite as absurd as it might initially sound.&nbsp; But that still doesn&#039;t explain why some of the short-run stars have such high catalog values.&nbsp; To understand *that*, you need to know one more quirk of the way the BEP uses star notes.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are two separate inspections of the printed currency when error notes can be removed and replaced by stars.&nbsp; The first inspection takes place right after the serial numbers have been printed, before the sheets are cut; an error sheet caught here will be replaced by a sheet of star notes.&nbsp; The second inspection takes place after the notes have been cut and strapped into 100-note packs; if an error is caught here, the whole pack will be replaced by a pack of 100 star notes.&nbsp; (It&#039;s more efficient to throw out 99 good notes along with the error than to slow down the process by undoing the strap to replace just the one bad note.)</p><p><br /></p><p>In practice, far more stars are used during the second inspection than the first, largely because of that 99-to-1 ratio.&nbsp; Therefore, when the BEP needs more full packs of star notes, they usually print up a full run of 3,200,000 stars.&nbsp; But when the BEP needs more replacement *sheets* of star notes, they usually print a shortish partial run of stars, because relatively few replacement sheets will last them a while.</p><p><br /></p><p>The upshot is that star notes from full print runs generally enter circulation in the form of full star packs, many of which are intercepted by bank tellers and sold into the collector market.&nbsp; So these stars are easily obtained from dealers in CU condition.&nbsp; But star notes from short print runs generally enter circulation one or two at a time, sprinkled through innocent-looking packs of regular notes, meaning that far fewer of them are noticed and saved while they&#039;re still CU.&nbsp; Thus the rarity of these stars in the collector market is much greater than you&#039;d expect from just looking at the printage numbers, and their prices are correspondingly high.</p><p><br /></p><p>That may not persuade anyone to start collecting this way, but hopefully it at least sheds a bit of light on why the market for these notes looks the way it does....&nbsp; <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie6" alt=":cool:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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