got these 2 beauties in the mail today. they are to 2 consecutive GEM CU 1995 $5 Chicago *star notes. they have a wonderful new home in my Chicago collection. if you have a chance stop on by and check out the whole Chicago collection. it seems to get bigger everyday http://www.banknotebank.com/user_view.aspx?id=NUTZFORCHITOWN
It's a note with a star in the serial number, in place of one of the letters. The BEP uses them as replacements for notes that are found to be defective during the printing process. The idea is that, when they catch a misprinted note, they can throw it away and stick a random preprinted star note in its place. That way, the count of notes issued stays accurate (if they start at serial number 1 and print up to 32,000,000, then they actually issued 32 million notes) but they don't have to take the trouble of resetting the presses to reprint the bad note with the exact same serial number. These days, star notes seem to account for about 0.5% of all notes issued, though that percentage has fluctuated quite widely over the decades. It'd be *much* smaller now, except that some years ago the BEP decided to speed up the replacement operation by, in the final inspection step, replacing full straps of 100 notes by full straps of stars, instead of undoing the straps to replace just the one bad note.
