Information about web press notes
a.k.a. web notes
a.k.a. The Government's Last-Ditch Attempt to Avoid the Inevitable
(Welcome to Kevin Colosa's Web Note Information Site.)

Hello, out there in the land of typos and damn-near-impossible-to-find web sites. After all, if you're doing a search for "web" and "notes" on the "Web", you may as well be looking for a specific, special needle in a needle surplus warehouse (finding a needle in a haystack is easy - use a metal detector). In any case, through perseverance and faith, through thick and thin and dark of night and all that groovy stuff, thou hast found my Web Note Web Site. So let's get on with business, shall we?

Okay. In my own cynical worldview (which for all we know might be right on target or way out in left field), the use of a web press to print our nation's currency was a last-ditch effort on the part of the government to try and win a losing battle - to make the production of one-dollar bills a cost-effective venture, and thus avoid the need to resurrect the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin. Now, here was one job they couldn't export to Mexico or China to take advantage of that cheap labour, because the law says that the production of U.S. coins and currency must happen within our borders. Bummer, right?

In any case, the good ol' B.E.P. (that's the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, for you newbies) began experimenting in 1992 with printing the one-dollar denomination Federal Reserve Note (read: $1.00 bill) on a web-fed press. This press printed our one-dollar notes on a continuous roll of paper*, much like a newspaper is printed, both sides printed during the same pass. Notes printed on this press, or "web notes", were printed in blocks of 96 notes onto this continuous roll of paper* (The standard way is for U.S. currency to be printed on flat sheets of 16 or 32 notes each, one sheet at a time, first the backs, and then the faces, in two distinct production steps.)

(*The term "paper money" is technically incorrect; the "paper" on which our currency is printed is actually a fine grade of cloth. That's why a $1.00 bill (or a $20, or any other denomination) can go through a full laundry cycle in your pocket and come out fine. Which is really a good thing, if you think about it.)

Web notes were produced in the following series: 1988A, 1993, & 1995.

Web notes can be easily distinguished from sheet-fed notes, because of the placement or absence of certain features on the notes themselves. Perhaps the easiest way to distinguish a web note from a regular note is to check the placement of those little numbers that are found on virtually all U.S. Federal Reserve Notes. To understand what I'm talking about, read the next section:

You will note (no pun intended) that the JPEG below is a one dollar Federal Reserve Note (FRN). If you aren't familiar with web notes yet, a good thing for you to do right now is to get a few one-dollar bills and then come back. Don't worry; I'll wait.

Okay. Look at the circled areas marked with the letters "A" and "B." A regular (sheet-fed) FRN will have a tiny plate position indicator (for example: E3) in the center of circle A. Web notes, since they were not printed with plates in the conventional sense, have NOTHING in that space. This is perhaps the easiest way to distinguish a web note from a sheet-fed FRN.

In the center of circle B, regular notes will have another tiny code containing a letter or letters and a number from 1 to 999. Web notes will have no tiny letters here; they will have only a tiny number, between 1 and 10. These tiny "check numbers" on web notes, as far as anyone can guess, may indicate different ink mixtures, different printing pressures, or some other information about the printing process. After handling many webs, particularly from the 1988A series, I've noticed that each front check number seems to bring a distinctive "look" to the note, particularly when it comes to George's portrait. The only way to illustrate this is visually, and unfortunately .gif and .jpg images don't do it justice...

You can also check the back of a note to see if it was printed on the web press. Regular notes have their plate numbers located in the bottom right corner of the white space to the right and below the "E" in the large "ONE" (marked with a "B" below). Web notes have their check numbers (known back check numbers: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12) just to the right of "TRUST", above the "E" in "ONE" (marked with an "A" below ).

Well, that all depends on your own personal definition of "complete." Let me illustrate some examples of types of web note collections, from simplest to most complex.

Some collectors are satisfied with collecting one note from each district for each of the three series in which web press notes were produced. Such a simple series and district set would have 12 (or perhaps 13) notes, as follows:

• 1988A Boston (A-E or A-F or A-G block)
• 1988A New York (B-L block)
• 1988A Philadelphia (C-A)
• 1988A Richmond (E-I or E-K)
• 1988A Atlanta (F-L or F-M or F-N or F-U or F-V and/or perhaps F-*)
• 1988A Chicago (G-P or G-Q)
• 1993 New York (B-H)
• 1993 Philadelphia (C-A)
• 1995 Boston (A-C or A-D)
• 1995 New York (B-H)
• 1995 Cleveland (D-C)
• 1995 Atlanta (F-D)

The next level of web collecting is the block set. Just turn all the "or"s in the above list to "and"s, and you will find there are 22 blocks in all.

Beyond this level lies the level of collecting by block and production run. Since a production run is comprised of 6,400,000 notes, there can be fifteen complete production runs in an eight-digit serial numbering (SN) system. To illustrate: Notes from Run 1 will have SNs in the range 00000001-06400000, Run 2 will have SNs from 06400001-12800000, and so on up to Run 15, with SNs in the range 89600001-96000000. For example, the 1988A A-E block web notes were produced for three separate production runs: Run 5 (SNs A25600001E-A32000000E), Run 7 (A38400001E-A44800000E), and Run 10 (A57600001E-A64000000E). Below is a handy-dandy table that gives the serial number ranges for all 15 standard production runs:

There are some super-rare combos (front plate-back check combinations) out there, even in such common blocks as the Series 1995 B-H and A-D web note production runs. The one that stands out most clearly with many block-and combo collectors is the infamous A-D (2-9) combination. From my research, done by compiling lists of serial numbers for the A-D web run, it seems that just about 20,000 A-D (2-9)s were made. And given that the average lifespan of a dollar bill is eighteen months, it's a good bet that fewer than half that number survive. The 1995 B-H webs from run 8 (SNs B44800001H to B51200000H), combo (6-8), is also extremely rare (although the (6-8) combo is plentiful in run 6 (SNs B32000001H to B38400000H) However, living in Vermont, I have had many more A-Ds pass through my hands than B-Hs, and as such have not been able to compile as thorough a rarity census on the B-H run 8.

Other infamous combos are the 1993 C-A (1-8) combo from run 9 (SNs C51200001A to C57600000A), the 1988A F-U (1-2) from run 11 (F64000001U to F70400000U), and the F-N (3-5) from run 12 (F70400001N to F76800000N). There are others, but these are some of the better-known "toughies".

The 1995 A-D web notes are surrounded with truth, hearsay, and just plain misinformation, and it's been difficult for many people to distill the facts from the fiction. Here, in this page, I hope to set the record straight.

Apparently, an article was published in a numismatic publication some time in late 1996 or early 1997 that suggested that A-D web notes from run 13 (SNs A76800001D-A83200000D) were supremely rare, or that an error was made in their production, or something... and it was this very ambiguity that caused quite a stir in the web note collecting community. As it turned out, A-Ds were not as rare as many people thought; they simply were not a run that got dumped en masse into a large city, where many dealers would be likely to find and acquire packs of CU material. Instead, about 2.5 million A-D Run 13 webs (and NON-webs, as I'll get to shortly) were distributed to banks in South Burlington, VT and Plattsburgh, NY, way up near the Canadian border, and far from Boston and New York City.

The "production error" which was widely rumoured had to do with the mixing (by accident or intentionally, nobody knows for sure except the folks at the BEP, and they ain't said a word) of standard (sheet-fed intaglio press, hence "non-web") notes with web press notes. Read on...

The last webs sent to COPE-PAK (serial numbering facility) were the Series 1995 A-Ds, run 13 (SNs A76800001D through A83200000D). Either due to an error, or just because they didn't have enough web-fed notes to make a complete "stack" of 200,000 sheets (200,000 sheets of 32 notes each = one run of 6,400,000 notes), run 13 was comprised of 180,000 sheets of web notes and 20,000 sheets of regular (sheet-fed) FRNs. If you look at run 13 by sequential SNs, the first 20,000 notes of each 200,000 are non-web notes. Only 640,000 "non-webs" were produced in run 13 (this is also the total number of 1988A F-* notes produced). Many collectors seek at least one of these "A-D non-webs in the web range" for their sets.

Feedback is welcome and appreciated. The study of web notes is a relatively new domain, and I am well aware of the fact that the information I provide here is, as it says at the top of the page, "random and incomplete." If you have any additional web press note information that you didn't see mentioned here on my site, please contact me. Knowledge is power. The more information we compile about web notes, the better informed everyone will be... anyway,