Score!

This week was a good week for me.  On a business trip, I stopped into a small town antique store and was pleasantly surprised to find a nice inventory of coins and currency for sale.  I found that their currency prices are a bit high.  I found a super nice, likely Extremely Fine, 1928 "Funnyback" $1 Silver Certificate.  They wanted $75 for it, which was too high if it was an ordinary note.  However, this note was printed with the Z-B block.  The Z-B block was one of a group of experimental notes printed for one or two months that was made of a special denim fabric.  It looks the same as a normal note, except for he Z-B block.  Anyway, to make a long story short it is worth about $250 in it's condition and it was mine for the bargain price of $75.


This made me (more) interested in the rarer small notes.  I recently put a very nice 1934 African Emergency $10 note up for sale on ebay.  I had an offer on it for $80 which was a tad too low, and I was waiting to see if I'd receive more offers before my 48 hour deadline to make a decision expired.  However, a VF 1934 Funnyback Star Note in (about) VF was suddenly listed on ebay for $79.  I knew that was a bargain, figuring it was worth $125, so I pulled the trigger and bought it, and then accepted the offer on the African note figuring that I would use the money to fund the star funnyback.  I think I picked up a little equity on the deal, however I believe the star note it much rarer than the African note...only 107 have been slabbed by both grading services.  Compare that to 4,500+ slabbed 1909-S VDB cents in existence which sell for about 8 times as much money depending on grade.

I also have another deal in the hopper that I'm going to wait on with my $20. :)


Collector Steve