THE BANK-NOTE LIBRARY.

Grey River Argus, Volume XII, Issue 1184, 15 May 1872, Page 3

THE BANK-NOTE LIBRARY.

The library of cancelled notes covers an enormous area under the offices of the Bank of England. These catacomba are » filled with wooden racks, in which are r placed more than 16,000 deal boxes of about lft in height and breadth and 18in in length. In these boxes or coffins lie, carefully packed, bundles of assorted notes, and on the outside are painted certain letters and figures, which, to the officers of these gloomy abodes, tell of the date and rank of the deceased. These notes are kept for seven years, and so complete is the arrangement that any single note, the date and number of which may be known, can be produced in five minutes by the person in charge of this department The nominal value of these buried notes exceeds L 3,000,000,000, the actnaJ number of notes being about 100,000,000. Strange and curious instances of the longevity of some of these flimsy bank-notes are continually occurring, and their histories, if one could trace them, would afford abundant materials for romance. LI -notes, which have long since passed away from circulation on this side of the Tweed, and which are new mainly associated in the minds of Englishmen with forgery and capital punishment, present themselves for recognition and payment at the average of about two per month. During the thirty years preceding that of the abolition of capital punish-

ment for forgery there were noHewtljan--1816 convictions for this crime, the majority of forgeries being of Ll-notes ; and of the persons so convicted 628 were hifng in various parts of the country. Not ldng ago a L2-note, a kind of which a ve;ry small number were printed at the commencement of the present century, pjreaonted itself to claim its long-promis>d two sovereigns of gold. Some are worn to almost indistinguishable rags — the amount of the note has disappeared, but the date and signature afford the clue] to its identification in the bank ledgers. The oldest note in the possession of the Bahk of England is one of 3698. A L2o-note, of more than a century old, was presented a short timo since, when it was calculated that the compound interest on its amount, supposing it to have been recoverable, would havo been over L6OOO.