Bank Note Printers and Specimen Notes

Bank Note Printers

Printers’ names, abbreviations or monograms will usually appear as part of the frame design or below it on face and/or back. In some instances the engraver’s name may also appear in a similar location on a note. The following abbreviations identify printers for many of the notes listed in this volume:

Specimen Notes

To familiarize private banks, central banks, law enforcement agencies and treasuries around the world with newly issued currency, many nations provide special “Specimen” examples of their notes. Specimens are actual bank notes, complete with dummy or all zero serial numbers and signatures bearing the overprinted and/or perforated word “SPECIMEN” in the language of the country of origin itself or where the notes were printed.

Some countries have made specimen notes available for sale to collectors. These include Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Slovakia after World War II and a special set of four denominations of Jamaica notes bearing red matched star serial numbers. Also, in 1978, the Franklin Mint made available to collectors specimen notes from 15 nations, bearing matching serial numbers and a Maltese cross device used as a prefix. Several other countries have also participated in making specimen notes available to collectors at times.

Aside from these collectors issues, specimen notes may sometimes comand higher prices than regular issue notes of the same type, even though there are far fewer collectors of specimens. In some cases, notably older issues in high denominations, specimens may be the only form of such notes available to collectors today. Specimen notes are not legal tender or redeemable, thus have no real “face value”.

The most unusual forms of specimens were produced by Waterlow and Sons. They printed special off colored notes for salesman’s sample books adding the word SPECIMEN and their seal.

Some examples of how the word “SPECIMEN” is represented in other languages or on notes of other countries follow: