Call me naive but I am having a hard time accepting that such knowledge is sparse. I hear this refrain frequently that it is difficult to get information from BOC and yet I see statements in publications confirming verification by the BOC or coming from reliable sources at BOC.
Obviously, somebody knows what is happening, but here are some tidbits of information that should shed some light:
- The Bank of Canada does not print notes. The printing companies (BAI and CBN) print the notes and ship them to the Bank of Canada.
- Printing of notes is very secretive and secure despite the fact that privately-owned companies are doing the work. The reasons are obvious... The less the public knows about what goes on at the printing facilities, the less likely that counterfeiters will be able to copy the product.
- If having a job printing our circulating legal tender is well-paid, what incentive is there for the workers to do anything to risk their jobs? Any leak of information could put the jobs in peril.
I would have thought that the community of currency collectors after years of fostering the hobby might have at least developed good relationships with the BOC and the printing companies to allow exchange of information at a very basic level and of interest to the collector community.
Define "very basic level". The BoC does provide very general information. However, anything to do with note production processes is not going to be divulged. I have no doubt that many currency collectors have had their expectations raised by how willing the Royal Canadian Mint is to divulge information to coin collectors. But the Mint is in the business of making and selling Mint Products, just like any private company that makes collectible trinkets from figurines to spoons to collector plates to Elvis busts. The Bank of Canada is not in the collectibles business. They are responsible for the financial stability of the country's economy. That they are a public institution explains why they issue any information at all, otherwise we would get zilch from them.
Do the printing companies and the BOC not have anything to gain from the collective knowledge of the collector community? Is this type of information so secretive that sharing it in some generic way discloses some well guarded secrets?
Nothing to gain, everything to lose. Pissing off collectors is a very small price to pay for maintaining the security of our circulating tender. Also, truth be known, the BoC probably doesn't know a lot of specifics going on at the printers. I have a distinct feeling that the BoC does, in fact, take in information from collectors, but it's not a 2-way avenue of communication. For instance, when error notes turn up and are reported by people on this site or listed on ebay, I'm sure someone at the BoC is jotting down information. We are a source of feedback to them, albeit mostly indirectly. We tell them about defective notes, they investigate, but they don't report back to us.
In the meantime are there any other instances of this kind of notes in existence? Maybe this note is indeed rare!
Rare, maybe. But rarity and price don't always correlate. And if this type or "error" could be faked, that will really hold back speculation and interest.
I tend to share this sentiment. It's not as if it's State Secrets, or related to national security. Every now and then, one even sees news clips of the actual sheets being produced, although the last clip saw was of Journeys.
National security? Indeed it is. What do you think would happen if you woke up tomorrow and all of your cash was worthless?
I've also wondered why there seem to be proportionally so many more replacement notes than we had when there were asterisk and X notes. Are BABN and CBN really messing up that much? I've become curious how the replacement ranges are actually determined and verified? Especially in the higher denominations, where one might encounter issues with cash reporting regulations? My reasoning makes me wonder if there isn't some inside contact somewhere? Now I haven't actually counted up the numbers of all the replacement notes and compared them to the numbers of asterisk and X notes, but it's begun to make me wonder when we see replacement note ranges seemingly all over the place. Maybe I'm just overly curious?
The whole point of insert notes is that they are just regular notes issued in a non-chronological order. Every so often, someone voices the idea that there's some kind of master list of inserts being kept somewhere. Given that not every sheet from a replacement range is a true "insert" sheet, keeping such a list would be an organizational nightmare. Insert notes are just not the same thing as asterisk or X-replacement notes. Inserts have no discernible characteristics that identify them as anything other than regular notes. Even back when replacements were all discernible, not every note with an asterisk or "X" was actually issued as a replacement. I'm confident in this assertion through my research, but nobody ever listens to me because the truth it reveals is very scary. It means, basically, every now and then, someone can get their hands on large numbers of notes that happen to belong to insert ranges. Been there, done that, but forgot to buy the t-shirt.
There does not have to be any logic behind insert note range except that they cannot cross ream boundaries. We use research about serial number printing practices to nail down where those ream boundaries are, and how many sheets belong to each distinct ream. Sheet insert ranges have to conform to this knowledge. However, like I said, not every sheet from a ream where insert notes have been detected ends up being used for replacement purposes. That's why there seem to be more insert notes today than there were replacements in the past. All the Bank of Canada really cares about is getting the exact number of notes it orders. The notes don't have to be in order. There doesn't have to be 10,000 bricks for every prefix. All that matters is that the books have to balance.
