A couple of years ago I started collecting interesting foreign bank notes mainly from around the turn of the century and 1920's\1930s and and most any ABNCo inspired souverier cards . I really like notes by ABNCo. When I started collecting I could buy reasonably priced notes from almost any of the foreign currency vendors at the Baltimore Whitman show and leave with a few nice notes., mainly ABNCo. This year, at the Whitman show, I only bought one ABNCo. note, a VF 10 dinar Yugoslavia note, blue, "Progress." SCWPM 12 edition, page 1216, #21. About a month ago I bid online in the ABNCo auction. I noticed prices had escalated when compared to prices in the last online ABNCo auction. Would like recommendations from others for buying foreign currency. Thanks My currency collection has gravitated to mainly women, trains, birds & nautical scenes and just interesting notes. And ugly notes, of course these weren't created by ABNCo. I really like notes by ABNCo.
ABNCo printed notes for European countries tended to be earlier, and have more demand even from Europe. The notes they printed for their many Canadian customers, ie Charter Banks and Dominion etc tend to be fairly pricey but lovely. The bargains are countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and some Chilean notes. Their Brasilian notes are fairly well demand driven, perhaps a lot from Latin America collectors. Moving into Central America, several countries had many commercial banks that had ABNCo printed notes - Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and especially the latter two are reasonable to afford. Then there is Mexico, with some of the best overall examples of variety of designs, lots of commercial banks, lots of colour etc. Prices for some are very easy on the wallet, whilst others almost afford a second mortgage. The one area I have not yet broached are the Canadian Charter banks that opened branches in Jamaica and have large sized very lovely feminine vignetted sterling denomination notes - they usually start at about $1200+ for proofs/specimens.
My buying experiences are exactly as you describe. Most of my notes are from South and Central America, Mexico and few from Europe. On occasion I'll spend time browsing the Standard Catalog of Paper Money Unfortunately, I no longer see many of the reasonably priced nice South, Central American and Mexican notes anymore. I like the Canadian notes but they are too expensive for me right now.
These two are two notes printed by the ABNC for the Russian Provisional Government in 1917/1918. These two denominations were put into circulation, and the rest of the denominations were prepared to be released in 1918/1919, but the Soviets came to power and so these two were the only notes that hit circulation, and the other ones are just specimens: 1918 25 Rubles (I paid $12 for this one) 1918 100 Rubles (I paid $5 for this one)
There are a few Czechoslovak notes from 1919-1930's that are still affordable: Greece had a lot of ABNCo printed notes until the 1920's but I am finding them rather pricey. Mexico is one of my favourites to collect from:
Very nice notes. It's hard for me to decide which one I like best. That's the first ABNCo Czec I've seen. As soon as I figure out how to upload images from my Win7 PC to CoinTalk I'll upload the ones I bought at the Whitman show.
attached are pictures of my Baltimore Whitman 10 dinar Yugoslavia note, blue, "Progress" the reverse is a pile of rocks and low mountain in the background. The most uninspired ABNCo work I've seen. SCWPM 12 edition, page 1216, #21. I hope the pictures post OK I stopped using the Chrome browser and posted them using FireFox browser and Windows 7 64bit.
The vignette on the Jugoslavija note was also used on a couple of other countries notes - but also many USA city and corporate bonds.
