 The Festival of Coins is brought to you in partnership with the Numismatic Guarantee Corporation and the Royal Mint Museum. Okay so welcome to the Festival of Coins and to this session with our festival partners NGC and PMG. We're delighted today to be joined by Colin Blyth. Colin's a paper money collector and has been for over 20 years. He joined PMG in 2018 and specializes in South and Central American notes. Colin's a life member of the ANA, the American Numismatic Association, and also the International Banknote Society. He's a member of the Society of Paper Money Collectors, Numis Coal based in Colombia, and the Cuban Numismatic Association of America. Colin's written many articles about banknotes for the IBNS Journal. He's lectured on paper money and today he's going to talk about overprinted banknotes. So really looking forward to the talk Colin. I will hand the floor over to you and thanks very much. Thanks very much Matt and thanks for inviting me to speak to the Festival of Coins and I know this is going to be predominantly a coin, a group of people here. So I thought I'd do a topic overprinted banknotes that may may find has some parallels to counterstamped coins. So I hope you find it interesting. So let me just show you what what I want to cover today and I'll start with just giving a brief introduction to paper money guarantee or PMG and then talk a little bit about why banknotes are overprinted and the types of overprinted banknotes or in other words the reason why are banknotes overprinted there's often several different types of reasons and then finally why you can collect these things and I thought I'd start by showing you can see these images on the right and to me this note embodies why you want to collect overprinted notes and you can see the note at the top right that's an 1892 $5 Canadian Bank of Commerce note it's very beautiful note in its own right but you can see in the on the bottom left here is an example of the same note that was overprinted with a Yukon overprint in around circa 1896 and that Yukon overprint was done to designate that these notes would circulate in the Klondike region of the Yukon and Yukon's in the northwest part of Canada borders up to Alaska and these Yukon overprints were done in the 1896 to 99 era where a big gold rush was going on in the Klondike region and about 100,000 prospectors poured into the region over this period and I look at this note and I can just imagine a prospector trudging up a snowy covered mountain with a backpack full of full of his gear with this Yukon overprint $5 note in his pocket to to buy supplies and I think that's that really summarizes that what makes overprint so exciting it's that emotional attachment it's having seeing that Yukon overprint really can transform you back in time when that note was in was in use so there's a there's a lot of this excitement and attachment to the note so I'll start by just giving you an introduction to paper money guarantee or PMG and PMG is the world's largest third-party authentication grading and encapsulation service for paper money. We've certified more than 6 million notes since 2005 and just to put that in perspective all the other grading companies out there combined have not created anywhere near that number of notes so the numbers certainly speak to the trust that the collectors have put into PMG grading their paper money and we are the third-party authentication service of choice for a lot of collectors out there and the locations of PMG they were headquartered in Sarasota Florida US have two secure facilities totally 82,000 square feet and the facility on the on the bottom right there is our is our newest building and these both these facilities have access access controlled walk-in bolts for secure storage of collectibles a staff of armed guards and hundreds of security cameras so the message there is when you're when you're valuable collectibles come into our custody they're they're both insured and and very very well protected while they're in house until you get them received back we have offices in London Munich Hong Kong and Shanghai so truly a global footprint and unlike some other third-party rating companies out there that may have one or two people they're in their operating a small little location this is a PMG is not a mom-and-pop shop it's a it's a very large organization with a with a team of dedicated mismetists a lot of experts in many different fields work here so you can you can be assured that your items are coming under the the watch of very experienced professionals on paper money guarantee is part of a family of third-party authentication services that that are under the umbrella of certified collectibles for ccg and for those coin collectors out there you'll no doubt know the ngc name the name very well for our coin side you also may or may not know some of the other divisions but cgc which is certified guaranteed company does does very popular green of comic books and they also do a new division which which creates trading cards so like the pokemon card pictured here or magic cards and certified sports guarantee is is one of our newest companies and that's for sports card trading you may be aware that in July this year blackstone acquired a majority stake in ccg and they have a commitment to further expand ccg's geographical and product reach so we were a large company and with the plans to get larger in the future and i think collectors a takeaway is the is the deep financial strength of the company and so when you get a a coin certified by ngc or paper money certified by pmg there's a guarantee that goes with it and with the company is the financial strength to back up that guarantee so enough about the the infomercial there let's get into uh what what exactly overprints are so we're talking about collecting over printed bank notes so we should first start saying what is an overprint in itself and an overprint is an additional layer of text or graphics that's been added to a bank note after it's been printed and if you can see an example of the note on the right there's a there's the engraved printing is the main part of the note and this is high quality in intaglio printing it's made from a steel plate under high pressure after that note was made an overprint such as this was was then applied and most commonly these overprints are applied by letterpress or that's a relief type of printing so unlike the intaglio printing here which is engraved into steel plates so it's a recessed area where the it where the ink goes letterpress and relief printing is uh is a text image that is is to be printed on a raised area that's inked and then applied to the paper and so an example of of relief printing would just be a common stamp like this I don't know let's see this but you can see that the text and graphics have been raised above the face of the of the stamp ink is then applied and you can stamp the image down um you'll all see that in uh in a typewriter you have a a key that might have a letter e on it for example and that is strikes the paper as usually there's a rivet of ink between it but it's this is ink nonetheless it strikes the paper and the imprint of the e is left for letterpress you'll you'll often see that for the serial numbers so most notes that you'll have in circulation will have letterpress serial numbers it's essentially a wheel with numbers on it and there's several wheels all together that the numbers will line up to form a serial number you'll ink those they get stamped onto the onto the note and the dials advance the next number it's inked again and and so on um that's uh I I should just put I've got a little note here at the at the bottom um paper money collectors or bank you know collectors or sometimes uh use these terms very generically and uh so you may need here's uh say bank note or paper money or note and I'm all that's all meaning the same thing in a generic sense that it's either paper all in our money issued by various authorities around the world and I'm saying it's generic because sometimes what we call something a bank note that technically should mean is issued by an actual bank and most notes are but there are there are notes out there that for example are issued by municipal governments or provincial governments or uh by by companies so they're not actually issued by banks and yet sometimes confusingly we generically may say it's a bank note so sometimes people say well let's say paper money that's better but then that doesn't cover new types of substrate like polymer so then sometimes we'll just say notes so just uh if I interchange them forgive me but you'll understand it's a generic sense so now that we know what overprints are why are bank notes over printed in the first place why don't you just make a new bank note why are you putting these uh these funny overprints on them and I point out that overprints are issued bank notes unissued bank notes mark historical periods of crisis for celebrations such as a severe inflation regime changes or commemorative events so these are not normal situations often emergency situations they're one-off situations so that's that's the best way I can describe it overprints are not done in normal times uh in addition overprints are used to distinguish a bank note that is not able to be circulated as a not able to be used as a circulating medium of exchange and for example a canceled note it's been returned back to the to the bank the bank has redeemed it stamped canceled on it it's no longer able to be circulated no longer legal tender so to speak and I'll talk a bit more about uh specimens and canceled notes uh as we go on the the note up here is cool this is uh this is actually a note if you if you can see the date it's November 20th in 1918 and it's a government of Malta note it was produced during World War one and just before it got issued World War one ended on November 11th so you can see there's a very quick uh period here where it almost got issued but didn't they ended up stockpiling these notes then and as the World War two started so they between 1919 and 1939 Malta used British notes so Bank of England notes circulated in Malta but when the war World War two started there was a shortage of coinage and there was also risks of transporting notes from England to Malta so they decided to take these uh non-issued notes out of stock and over print them so the two-shelling note got over printed with a one-shelling marker to become a small changer or coins in the region so I want to talk there's there's many different reasons or types of over printed bank notes and I don't want to claim I've got an exhaustive list here but I tried to come up with a list that I think would account for the vast majority of over printed notes out there so the one reason you might over print a note is to change the denomination you might do it to change the name of the bank note or the issuer that's sort of the bank issuer or the note another over print could identify that it circulates in the specific region of circulation and that's that's much like the Yukon overprint that you saw at the very beginning and other and others more work for celebration or a commemorative type note and then you got to have a cancelled note that's that's been over printed to to say it's no longer valid for circulation and then there's specimen notes and I'll talk about specimen notes in a bit more detail but I think this note is very interesting and part of it is I I specialize in South and Central American notes I'm always going to find notes from those regions interesting but in 1933 the Nicaraguan government realized there was a shortage of notes in circulation but their records showed that there was a lot more notes in circulation that that was apparent so in other words they thought the there should be x number of notes circulating but they could really only see x minus y in circulation so in 1934 they issued an executive decree that required all the notes to be redeemed so turned in counted and then revalidated and this is the revalidation step you can see revalidado on in a diagonal red overprint here and that's to mark that the the note has been counted and revalidated so this is one situation where actually we're an overprint is is more common than the non overprinted note and that probably makes sense in this case this is a 1932 one cardoba note that would have been in circulation at that time which was then subsequently overprinted in 1934 but because the note would no longer be valid unless there was a revalidado overprint it was a tier of financial benefit to get these notes overprinted so ones that remain without the overprint are really notes that probably got tucked away by accident some are like maybe somebody left this in a book but regardless there is not very many of these 1932 notes that don't have the revalidado overprint on and in fact this note here the 1932 issue is the only note that PMG is graded to date so I want to explore that the different reasons that we mentioned here why most notes might be overprinted I'm going to go through each one of these bullet points and just give you a few visual examples I just want it to be fun and look at the different types of notes so the first reason why you might overprint a note is to change the denomination and during the 1980s there is a period of very high inflation in the caraba and in 1989 they overprinted the 1985 10 cardobas notes up here with a 10,000 portable note denomination and you can see that the the overprint hides the 10 it hides the DA score dobas down here and puts a new denomination and then seals however the what used to be the 10 and you know I find it interesting we're talking right now about the fears of inflation coming back and we're you know when you're seeing five percent six percent inflation you start getting nervous imagine living this time in Nicaragua your 10 cardobas notes is suddenly inflated to a 10,000 cardoba note between 85 and 89 that's as real inflation another example of denomination changes is from Colombia and due to a scarcity of coins in circulation the Colombian government decided to overprint 1942 and 43 one peso notes with a medial peso overprint and they did that on the left side and the right side of the note was printed then they sliced the note or cut the note in half and created half notes of medial or half pesos and those circulated like coins but obviously with the with the overprint on and here's another example of denomination change from Paraguay so the note in the the top right is a 1923 Paraguay 1000 peso note and in the bottom left you can see in 1943 Paraguay decided unlike the Nicaragua note that I showed you where they just started to add three zeros to the note and inflate that way Paraguay is going through the same inflation but instead decided to instead of adding zeros they would knock off some zeros so the 1000 became 10 and they changed the denomination from pesos to to Guarani's and I guess Guarani's was supposed to sound like it was a Guaranti or or new a stronger than the than the pesos but it's a somewhat amusing to see that the the pesos actually no pesos farete which is a strong peso so I guess it wasn't that strong after all and here's another example of a denomination change this is from Cyprus and unlike the the Colombian one that I showed you that was the medial peso it was sliced in half these one shilling notes from the British administration of Cyprus they cut the the right 40 percent of the notes so it's just the right half and it's only the 40 percent of the note and they overprinted just the right half they didn't use left and right just the right half with a three psts overprint and that was a stop gap for small change and I don't know this for sure but I'm gathering they didn't cut 50 go into the middle of the note because they didn't want to cut King George the six head in half in in doing so that was probably why they have the the right 40 percent of the note so then we'll move into the into the next reason or a type of overprinting and that's to change the the bank name or the issuer name and I've used an example from Colombia this is a 1908 Colombian albanco de serra one peso and after following world war one there was a shortage of cash in the area and for this reason and and to save money in 1919 Banco Lopez overprinted the the Banco de serra note they put a new date on here you can see 1919 out to the top where albanco de serra was they've overprinted that albanco Lopez and this a little bit hard to see but it is there it's the l Banco and then Lopez and they've they've also got they've also cancelled out the the names of the the initial signers at the bottom and this is a really cool note from china because it's a there's a lot going on with it so not only is there a bank name change at the top but there's also a denomination change and they've even changed the branch of issue at the bottom so you can see up at the top it's a russian chinese bank note that was changed to russian asianic bank and you can see china chinese here has been covered with asianic the 100 teals denomination here has been overprinted and they've to cover it up and they've added $100 as the new denomination and then the atiantsin branch at the bottom left has been covered up and they've added a harbing branch so that's a really cool one to get because it's a not an example of a lot of different reasons why you'd overprint the note and then here's another example of a bank name change but i used this as an example because this one's not quite as clear or easy for the collectors to see and what happened in this period this is from Paraguay and in 1879 the the fledgling republican paraguay was struggling to set up a financial system which included setting up some banks to encourage business in the region so with the government's encouragement a small bank albanco del paraguay started and this is started by two gentlemen with a capital of only 10 000 pounds so you can imagine there's there's not a lot of deep pockets there um but they're they're trying and they lasted long enough that they could actually issue um a really popular nice looking series of bank notes in 1882 the dated 1882 and it's an animal series and very very popular collectors but by the time 1883 rolled around the bank of del paraguay was in serious financial trouble to the tune that they they had to be saved and acquired by a bank of national the paraguay and rather than the bank of national the paraguay withdrawing the albanco del paraguay notes at the time and and issuing your own notes uh i think bluntly to save money they decided instead simply to to put an overprint on the back of these notes in uniface there's nothing on the back of the note so this is the back of the note they put a uh an overprint on the back and the overprint act says bank of national and has the dates 1883 so what this overprint has done is it's now guaranteed the note and identified it as a bank of national issue and rather than the albanco del paraguay and that's why you'll see on the pmg label even though the notes as albanco del paraguay here it's a it's a bank of national issue because of the 1883 overprint on the back and i wanted to show you this is actually my favorite note in the series it's the 20 centavos note and this is uh the the same 1882 albanco del paraguay note you can see the bank title here and the uh what is the date the date is date is up here so that that was from the original issue of albanco del paraguay this one like the example i showed on the screen the 10 centavos example was overprinted on the back and you can see there's there's several stamps on the back which is common you see different bank stamps in this era you'll even see it on modern notes but the bank stamp the stamp you need to look at for this purpose is the middle stamp that's a bank of national 1883 overprint and that's why this one has been identified as a bank of national 1883 issue by pmg so the the bank bank of national circulated these notes these overprinted notes from 1983 to sort of 1883 to 1886 and in 1886 finally got around to issuing their own notes and here is an example of the note and see if i get the reflection off but the notes are essentially identical except if you look closely at the bank title here you can see that's a that's bank of national del paraguay rather than just albanco del paraguay and the date has changed to an 1886 date so this can be a very even though it's a beautiful series it also can be quite challenging because you have a period where you have 1882 issued albanco del paraguay notes then in 1883 when they when banko national took them over banko national you can find these notes that are over printed with banko national so you can have two types you know this type that's just the 1882 note and you can also have it as a bank of national issue with the overprint then as you move into this type with the 1886 banko national note that they continued on until 1890 and in 1890 they too went under some serious financial troubles such that the republic of paraguay had to bail them out they took over issuing bank notes and private banks ceased after 1890 in paraguay but there's actually a period here in 1890 where the republic of paraguay over printed these notes with an 1890 overprint so those are technically republic of paraguay issues so it's it's fascinating it also you know it can be great opportunities for chair picking because there's not a lot of people out there that unless they specialize in this series we'll know all those differences so hopefully maybe if you pass one of these at a bourse table in the next year or two it may catch your eye and here's one of my favorite reasons for overprinting a note it's to identify a specific region for the circulation of that note and the example shown to the right is is a pakistan note but it was an indian note that's been over printed with government of pakistan and pakistan separated from british india in 1947 as part of that transition during 1948 and i've got here april 1948 indian these indian notes were over printed for exclusive use in pakistan only and this was a transition until until pakistan got their own series of notes from thomas deliru in october 1948 and they were subsequently demonetized in pakistan in 1949 but what a cool piece of history there the uh and collectors know this not only is that overprint or scarce it's just very very popular so the indian note is of course popular in its own right but you have this overprint on it and the scarcity and value jumps significantly because of the demand notes with those overprints and us collectors out there will instantly recognize this note this was a this was as a precaution against the japanese invasion and occupation of hawaii in 1942 the us specially marked 1934 a series us currency with a hawaii overprinted you can see hawaii is over printed here and then on each side of the note on the face and that overprint was done in the event of a japanese invasion the overprinted currency could have been declared worthless those were cautionary measure fortunately that didn't happen and there's still a fair number of hawaii overprints out there for collectors so you can still buy these at fairly reasonable prices in the market and what a cool piece of history so i'll jump over to africa and if you look at the if you look at this note after the separation of rewanda and barundi in 1964 a barundi overprinted these 1960 to 61 500 franc notes with with big barundi overprint and that was for exclusive use in barundi and another another example here is this note from uruguay and for a brief period the banco de republic of oriental actually overprinted some of their notes to to recognize that these were branch office issues and you can see montevideo here which is the capital the main central area of uruguay all those notes coming out of the main bank were not overprinted but in more the remote regions of uruguay there was branch offices and they for brief time applied the the overprint the head office then decided you don't need to do this anymore and and that ceased so we see this in 1888 the lower denominations like the one in the five days so those those were ordered to be pulled out they still allowed the higher denominations to be overprinted but there wasn't very many of these high denominations anyway so either the overprint or the non overprinted in a higher denomination like that is is actually quite rare but on the on the smaller denomination ones having that overprint is extremely valuable because it only lasted for for several months where they did those branch office overprints and it can be confusing for collectors of uruguay to to know when an overprint is valuable or not because the 1887s the earlier issue of banco national and in uruguay it was it was very common to to overprint notes for the regional distribution areas and you can still fairly easily find overprinted notes but as you moved in now into 1888 1899 where the banco de republica oriental is issuing the notes any overprinted notes from that issue are extremely scarce so again it's good to keep in your mind if you see any republica oriental notes that are overprinted it's probably a good idea to grab those and then find out later what you have so to move on for another reason that overprinting is done it's uh it's it's a celebration or a commemorative event and i've got an example here of a bermuda 1994 $100 note uh this was an overprint on an 89 series and you can see right here uh the bottom left is uh is an overprint commemorating the 25th anniversary of the bermuda monetary authority in 1969 to 1994 and another such example of a commemorative note or a celebratory notice from shown here it's a Costa Rica 1971 10 colons and that's got the overprint at the bottom left commemorating the 150th anniversary of the independence 1821 to 1971 and another reason for applying overprints is to cancel or withdraw money from circulation i mentioned council before you could actually have a rubber stamp or stamp that a bank the note has been redeemed by a customer might be a bit raggedy they're just taking it out of circulation they would often put a cancelled stamp on it to indicate it's been redeemed and withdrawn so it should no longer be circulated as a medium of exchange and so in other words not legal tender but this is a cool uh overprint and and collectors this is a this is a bank of England one pound note and it's affectionately called the guernsey overprint by by collectors and this was a world war two overprint it was a it was done before the german occupation forces arrived into guernsey the local officials overprinted an estimated 5000 pieces with this overprint that says withdrawn from circulation september 18th 1941 and that was to to stop the legal tender notes falling into the hands of the german forces that could be used elsewhere so that's that's another great marker of a moment in history and highly sought after by collectors and you can see with 5000 pieces having been overprinted there's still availability in the market to be able to find what these and now I'll talk about specimens that's another reason you may see an overprinted note and specimens were made by the printing company to give to the banks or to the tellers or other other people that are looking at the note to give them an idea what the new design will look like to approve it to acquaint the tellers of what's what's coming down the pipe and you'll see unique identifier over printers primarily being the specimen overprint so that indicates it's just an example note you can't spend it specimen notes also can have other things on it like canceled or perforations or it's very common to have zero all zero serial numbers such as this one and here's a specimen perforation in the center of this note as well but it's really the overprint that that stands out specimen meaning this is a this is not a note that can be spent so why collect overprinted notes at all and I think as you can see as we've talked for for me what really comes out is that record of history here it captures a moment in time a very unusual event and collectors can have very deep emotional attachment to that event just by looking at that overprint it brings you back that event it's also a great record you can see as the country went through the non overprinted to the overprinted note you can see a transition in history so that that no doubt in my mind is the number one reason for collectors wanting overprinted notes also there's there's collectors that collect notes by theme so you can have a you might collect by by country you might collect by denominations a lot of a lot of different ways you can collect and there's nothing right or wrong about whatever way you want to collect but overprinted notes there there are collectors that just concentrate on collecting overprinted notes and then I put this third point rarity it's I think it's it's human nature to want to get things to collect things that are unusual or scarce or rare and overprinted notes will often fall in this in this category um I I'd say the uh I put it as an example here this uh this is an Iranian note and in the 1978 to 79 uh revolution revolution that happened in Iran in 1918 the new 1980 sorry the new regime overprinted the the notes from the late 70s and they covered the shawl of Iran with uh graphics and they also covered the the watermark which was also of the shawl with the the lion and and sun symbol and that was done to discredit and disgrace the the former regime and the and the shawl so it's a real moment of history recorded here and I'd like to end here at the last slide and this is a I've got a title here trust in what you collect and overprinted notes are are really cool and they're they're sought after and because of that you will often get people trying to fake overprints either with you know creating a rubber stamp or using an inkjet or laser jet printer print on top of a normally issued note so collectors have to be very diligent to understand and look at the characteristics of these overprints and that's where PMG can really come in we we do deeply understand what the characteristics are of these overprints and once it goes in a holder we are guaranteeing that that overprint is authentic and that's backed up by our guarantee so for collectors that are putting a lot of time energy and money to collect and overprinted notes they want to they want to make sure that that when it comes time to sell or when it comes time to buy that they know what they're buying is a genuine overprint so that's a that's a good little reassurance for collectors to know that that really is authentic when they buy it in a PMG holder I thought that when I told the graders in the PMG grading room that I was going to talk about overprinted notes I asked them what's your favorite overprinted note and the I tried to concentrate on the the senior graders so these are what we call finalizers so there for example might be three people graders grading note they'll each put their own opinion on what that grade is and the finalizer will then do the same thing he'll grade the note but he then looks at the grades that the other three graders gave and ultimately decides what the grade should be so for example one person thought it was a 25 one thought it was a 30 and it's one of those notes that's right in between the finalizers expertise we'll look at that we'll look at the note and determine which grade it goes and the I would point out to these the finalizers and the graders at PMG are there's a lot of history majors there they they get a real kick out of out of looking at these notes and especially then overprinted notes that come through and the the graders there these finalizers I want to ask what's your favorite overprinted note a common consensus was this victory overprint and this is a Philippines victory overprint so it was done in 1944 and the victory overprint was to to celebrate the liberation of the Philippines and Japanese occupation and that was done right on October 20th 1944 when US general Douglas MacArthur returned to the Philippines and another really cool part of this victory series as you can see on the front of the notes says victory series number 66 and what is that 66 for the the second president of the Philippines and that was Manuel Luis Quezon he died at 66 years old in August 1944 so just prior to the liberation of the Philippines so that was a recognition to the president of the Philippines putting series number 66 which which matches his age when he died so it's a really it is a really cool overprinted series you've got just just the sheer joy of of victory and the liberation of Philippines showing up here and the recognition of of their the president up there so just I can see why it's one of the favorites and I'll stop there I I just the little purpose just to give you a very general overview of overprinted notes I I hope you enjoyed it especially the the coin collectors out there I hope maybe you might even consider looking and starting to buy one or two overprinted notes your collection of somethings of of interest to you so thanks very much and I'll turn it back over to Matt thank you Colin that was great really interesting some really nice designs I love I love some of those banknotes what can I ask a few questions here firstly what's the appeal with the South American and Central America is that just something that you've chosen or is that particularly over overprint particularly common in that region I think a combination of both now it is I've tended to probably have a little bit more overprints from South and Central America just because I know them I just have an attachment to them collecting there's overprints from many different parts of the world so there's probably more skewed there because of my interest in them but you're also right that there was a lot of chaotic things going on in South and Central America during that period and and I mentioned that overprints happened in times of crisis and there was there was no shortage of crises then and so probably percentage wise there's a lot more overprinted knots on that region as well yeah yeah it's fascinating region just just from that short you know presentation you can tell there's just so much to explore one thing I was wondering it are there many overprints that are still discovered are there new discoveries being made I you know that that's something that never ceases to amaze me is the discoveries that are being made and not just for overprints across across the whole board we I would say you know every year we get one or two new notes that we've never seen and that's probably even an underestimation I mean just in the last couple months there's been two notes that are very very rare notes that have showed up one from Venezuela that that we didn't even know existed before but a lot of research into it and it was in a very unusual time period in Venezuela we confirmed that the signatures were correct we confirmed that the the denomination the region was correct and it's so exciting when things like that happen so yes that that's also can happen for overprinted notes and I'm sure there's varieties out there we haven't discovered yet and that's that's the the one amazing thing about getting to work at at PMG is to be able to see some of these things come in and then you do a double take and say how did this show up you know it's been hundreds of years where where has this been how did it show up but these things are still happening so I have no doubt there's probably more overprints out there that we're not aware of and we're we're always looking anxiously for things like that to come in so we can identify new notes and and you know with PMG's expertise in identifying notes we do have the confidence to be able to put you know if we can if we can work backwards and find historical records and verify this note to the to our to our opinion existed we will put our money on and guarantee that so you know we we do take the time and look at look at these unusual items and I I mean that's that's one of my favorite parts of the job is strange things going on yeah excellent okay and is there is there any are there any resources for for overprints you know their lists or anything like that that people can kind of refer to or you know start so they can start off or is it just a case of exploring it's it's probably a case of exploring more than saying there's a catalog just exclusively for overprinted notes but I suggest you you can go to the country you're interested in and there's lots of catalog country catalogs or or general catalogs so the sort of the most collectors will know out there the standard catalog of world paper money so that's that's probably a good place to start you can go through that and you'd be able to find overprinted notes for that country by by reading the descriptions in there you can also there's things like the banknote book which is which is very good and in terms of discussing very much giving a lot of detail on why these overprint happen so I'd say that's an excellent source as well one good source is banknote.ws if you go on there it's it's a very cool site that's got what I like about it's got color images of all the notes and you can flip through there and be able to see some of the overprinted notes but you know one of the unfortunately one of the best ways is is through specialized catalogs so actually if you wanted Columbia you'd get a specialized Columbia catalog you want India you get a specialized India catalog so those are available in the market but it's expensive so if you're just interested in checking it out I would stick to you know maybe more general general catalogs like the standard catalog of world paper money or just go into free sites like banknote.ws and check those out. Excellent okay and I think you answered this question during the presentation but it struck me that with overprints you know if an overprinted version of a banknote is worth a lot more then there are going to be people that try and forge that overprint so I guess you know how's the best way to kind of avoid those forgeries? Well you know it's a bit of a cliché but they always say buy the book before the note that there's a reason why that cliché exists because it's true and educate yourself before you buy something and that's part of that education process is understanding what a genuine overprint looks like and you know someone could just you know take a create a new modern rubber stamp and overprint it and you need to know the exact difference between what a letter press is what an intaglio print is what the you know certain rubber stamp the characteristics what what are the height the dimensions of the letters was there any little notches so it's very similar to coins you know if you know perfect coin if there's some feature that looks a bit off you're going to be wearing there's probably a reason so but it takes time to educate yourself and you know a lot of the new collectors especially on a valuable note you don't want to risk spending the five thousand dollars or something on a on a raw note you're not a hundred percent sure if it's genuine or not and that's where PMG can come in that collector while you're going through that learning curve at least if you're spending that kind of money you can it's probably going to be a lot safer for you buying something through party authenticated at least you have that comfort yeah excellent okay well that's brilliant Colin thanks so much for your time and for all your knowledge and sharing those notes with us it's been really good I would encourage everyone to go to the PMG website the addresses are on the screen now and thank you to PMG and NGC for being our partners with the festival of coins thank you so much Colin it's been great thank you so much Matt it's great to be here brilliant speak soon bye bye bye don't miss the festival showcase for more supported