In general, the purpose of the USPaperMoney.io site is to make available on the Internet a wide variety of background information about collectible and circulating U.S. currency.
This site had its beginnings in October 2000, but at that time it consisted entirely of twenty-some months' worth of BEP production data. The nice folks over at Where's George had been looking, without much success, for information on currency production dates. I was a relative newcomer to the collecting hobby at the time, and when I discovered that the BEP released monthly production reports which were published in the numismatic press, I thought it might be useful to post them on the Internet, since nobody else was then doing so. I obtained the initial data from a couple of years' worth of back issues of Coin World, and within a week or two I'd gotten them onto my university-hosted personal webpage, grouped by denomination and series. And thus began what has since become a much larger site, and absorbed much more of my spare (and not-so-spare) time, than I'd originally planned.
Over the succeeding months and years, I was able to locate more old BEP reports from back issues of Coin World, Paper Money, and the Rag Picker, which I obtained from several local libraries and longtime collectors. The monthly tables were extended backward, in several phases, finally covering more than thirty years' worth of currency production. And somewhere along the line, I discovered (a bit to my surprise) that my site was useful not only to the Where's George community but to a certain subset of the currency collecting community as well. Therefore, I started to expand the site in other directions, including pages on topics such as web notes and the evolution of U.S. currency designs. Thus the site moved away from its original emphasis on currency production dates and began to include more of a variety of currency-related information.
In the spring of 2004, I registered the domain USPaperMoney.io in order to provide a more permanent home for my rapidly-growing collection of webpages. I don't have any definite plans for how much larger the site may eventually become; certainly the amount of information I don't have is larger than the amount that I do have, but I've only so much time to devote to the project.... Still, if you have any particular suggestions for pages you'd like to see, let me know, and I'll think about them. I should mention, though, that I'm certainly not a currency dealer--nor even much of a collector for that matter--so I don't have much familiarity with up-to-the-minute currency pricing data. Therefore, I'm quite unlikely to even attempt to start a price guide here.
I'd like to thank Michele Orzano at Coin World, who went to the trouble of digging up and photocopying for me two years' worth of old BEP reports when I'd only emailed CW to ask if they knew of a good place to find them, and who also pointed me to several other potential sources of information.
Also, thanks to Ed Zegers and Doug Murray, both of whom sent me copies of the original BEP reports for certain months that somehow didn't make it into the hobby periodicals I was able to find.
I must also credit Doug Murray for nearly all of the large-size serialling data, which he has researched in great depth and kindly permitted me to use here.
And, of course, many thanks to all the sharp-eyed folks who've emailed me about typos and other errors on these pages, especially Nicholas Cheung who's caught about as many as everyone else put together. I do my best, but I'm not perfect; all of us together, however, are getting surprisingly close.
This site is hosted by NearlyFreeSpeech.Net. Cheap webspace...gotta love it.
In theory, this site is © 2000-2020 USPaperMoney.io. In practice, just about all of the actual data is probably public record, even if some of it was a bit difficult to track down. Besides that, the whole point of this site is to make all of this information more widely available. So feel free to use, copy, steal, &c. anything you'd like; that's what I've put it there for.
Except as noted, all currency images are my own scans of notes that are or were in my possession. I don't mind if you copy them. But please, if you use any of my images on another site, copy them to your own webspace first, and don't make me pay for the bandwidth. Thanks. :)
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