Lotus07

I really dig those Scottish notes, they have such beautiful stylized designs! Shame most of them are so expensive...

Here are pictures of the notes that I most recently purchased. I'm especially very happy about the Falklands note, these are pretty hard to find so when I saw this one advertised for a relatively low price, I was immediately sold! What's also curious about this particular note, is that the date on this note is issued one day after the Falklands War ended! So apparently this nice old banknote has some historical significance too! I also won this nice old Russian obligation on an Ebay auction for just a few US dollars. I don't really collect these, but I do think it has a really nice vintage design and it somewhat resembles a banknote!

Lovely notes, Baxuss! I especially like the Clydsdale one with the knight on it.

They don't have fumes I'm afraid, but I open them regularly, so the notes get 'fresh' air every now and then.

The quality isn't very high on the sleeves, but it'll do. I store them straight up in the cassettes, so the notes don't fall out. They're pretty solid though, as long as you grab them like you would normally grab your a note, nothing will happen to them. They're especially very useful for UNC notes, but for older, more worn out notes they tend to get a little bit more flexible. I agree it's not the best way of storaging them, but for me as a low-budget collector they do just fine!

Awesome notes, rbthea! You make me very jealous Are you planning to go to Houten as well?

Awesome notes, Baxuss! I realized that I'm a bit behind schedule with sharing my additions with you guys, so here's a compilation of what arrived on my doormat for the past few weeks: I also received a large bulk lot which was a lot of fun sorting out!

Several times I've heard from some collectors that they have trouble with storing their banknotes in a proper way, so I thought that you guys might appreciate it if I would share my view on how I store my notes. Personally, I like to hold my banknotes in my hands so I can view and admire them better. Unfortunately this doesn't really help to preserve my notes since human hands are always full of gems and bacteria. So having a some sort of plastic protection like an album would probably the most suitable solution for preserving your beautiful banknotes. The only downside of this is that good-quality albums are always expensive. I don't have anything against albums and sheets because they display banknotes in a very fine way, but paying 50 USD for an album that only holds notes worth 30 USD is simply a little too much trouble for me. But I still would like some sort of protection for my banknotes! Anyway, after some time searching on Ebay I found a Chinese dealer who sells 'banknote sleeves'. They are made from clear plastic and they come in 4 different sizes, in a pack of 400. These sleeves are probably the best thing I've came across so far because although they are quite thin, they let me hold my banknotes in my hands without me damaging them. Also, a pack of 400 costs less than 10 USD and they are shipped with free world-wide shipping! Probably some of you are already familiar with them, but I have never heard of them before. They came in a couple of days ago and personally I am very satisfied with the sleeves. Here's how it looks like when they have banknotes in them: The sizes are: 85x175 mm, 75x175 mm, 70x150 mm and 60x130 mm. Coincidently, I had some old videotapes laying around and I figured that the hard shells in which the videotapes are stored would make a perfect 'album' for my banknotes. The shells are also very practical when you are on a fair and quickly need to store your purchased notes somewhere. By the way, no dust can enter the shells unless you open them, which makes them again very useful. But unfortunately I have some banknotes that have a larger size than 85x175 mm, so I need to store those notes in a 'real' album: Not that it really matters to me, because the cost of the album makes up for the money I have saved on the sleeves!

It's een quite while since I've shown something, so here's what I got from the past few weeks: Now I only need 10 more notes to complete my collection of Yugoslavian banknotes!

Thank you for your reply, I totally agree with you! Personally, I like to collect by countries that have some sort of meaning to me. Those countries are mostly from behind the Iron Curtain and Yugoslavia off course. I got into collecting Yugoslavian notes when I was on a holiday in Croatia. I've visited some beautiful places while I was there and I just loved the way the country looks, it's just so different from what I'm used to and I really liked that! Eastern Bloc notes fascinate me mostly because of their history in the Cold War but also if you look at the history of the individual countries, like you exlained, you find out the nicest things. For example, I was looking through my Czechoslovakian banknotes a few months ago and I just randomly started to type in the names of the national heroes on those notes. After a few clicks I found out that one of those 'heroes' not only meant a lot in Czechoslovakian history, but also in the history of my own country, Holland. It's Jan Amos Komensky I'm talking about, he was a significant figure in the world of pedagogy and he spent most of his studies here in Amsterdam! We also see him as an important person for our society because he brought us all kinds of new knowledge on how to raise children. As a result, many high schools in the Netherlands are named after him and that's when I realised I recognized his name (in Dutch it's Comenius)! I also googled some of the names of other banknotes and that;s how I learned many things about these national heroes I first never heard about. Funny you told me about the modern Estonian banknotes, because I happen to have a couple of those as well and I didn't know that fact before! I'm glad you schared that with us, I'm certainly going to search more about the national heroes pictured on my banknotes!

No problem! ;-) Two more envelopes arrived today, including the following:

How do you catalog them in your collection? I use an excel spreadsheet to catalog all my banknotes and I store them randomly in albums made my Leuchtturm (Lighthouse), except voor the Yugoslav issues between 1965 and 2003, because I'm trying to get the full series! In my spreadsheet I order my notes by country, denomination, date, grade, KM#, and remarks (if needed). Here's how it looks like for general European notes, Yugoslavian notes and specialized issues: As you can see, I'd like to use different colors for all the sheets. Red is the only color with a specific meaning, it indicates that the note is not in my collection yet and is on my so-called wishlist. Hope this helps you.

I recently got these lovely notes:

The Argentinian notes are mostly from the 70s and 80s. The Falklands one is from 2012 I think. The others are issued between the early 60s and 90s.

I agree. When you get a very dirty, wrinkled and torn banknote like one of the above in your hands, it really gives you the feeling that what you're holding is genuinely used as currency.