The Devil in the Queen's Hair

Most of the numbers in this record were set by ordinary forces: silver quotas, commerce, the appetite of a growing country for pocket change. The newest series in the register is the only one whose figures were set by an optical illusion. Every printage on the 1954 Devil's Face page is a count of how many notes came off the presses before somebody fixed the Queen's hair, which makes the whole series that rarest thing in a mintage table: a printage with a deadline.

A new Queen in a hurry

King George VI died in February 1952, and Canada's paper money suddenly wore the wrong face. The Bank of Canada commissioned a full redesign for its new monarch: a portrait of Elizabeth II taken from a photograph by Yousuf Karsh, engraved for the printing plates by George Gundersen of the British American Bank Note Company, with the portrait moved out of the note's centre, where folds chew portraits to pieces. The backs got Canadian landscapes built from designs by the war artist Charles F. Comfort. Two firms shared the work, the Canadian Bank Note Company taking the $1, $20, $50, $100 and $1,000 and British American taking the $2, $5 and $10, and the series went out on September 9, 1954. It was, by every account, a handsome series. Then people started looking at the hair.

The face

Behind the Queen's ear, in the highlighted curls, there is a face. A hooked nose, a heavy brow, a pointed chin: once seen, it cannot be unseen, and within months of issue the Bank was receiving complaints about the devil grinning out of the new money. The theories arrived on schedule. Gundersen was suspected of smuggling it in and denied it flatly; other versions blamed pranksters or political saboteurs. The dull truth vindicates the engraver: set the engraving beside the Karsh photograph and it takes no liberties at all. The shapes were in the photograph. Gundersen's crime was fidelity.

The fix, and the deadline

The Bank ordered the face plates corrected. Yves Baril, an engraver at the Canadian Bank Note Company, darkened the offending highlights into ordinary hair, both printers reworked their plates, and from June 1956 no more devil's face notes were issued. That June is the invisible line that rules every figure in the series. Nothing about collector demand, nothing about the economy: the printage of each note is simply how far its presses got before the correction arrived.

One denomination was excused. Charlton records the $1,000's face plates as corrected only years after the rest of the series. A note that moved between bank vaults rather than between people embarrassed nobody at a shop counter, so the devil's face thousand kept its devil the longest, and it remains the only denomination of the type with a single signature pair: 30,000 notes, all of them Coyne-Towers, all of them prefix A/K.

Two signatures, one of them twice

The deadline had a collaborator: the signature clock. Graham Towers retired as Governor at the end of 1954, James Coyne moved up from Deputy Governor to Governor, and John Beattie took the deputy's chair, which gives the series exactly two signature pairs and gives James Coyne the odd distinction of signing both of them, first as deputy, then as governor. Where a prefix block straddled the handover it was split mid-run, and the splits produced the series' strangest numbers. The $50 and $100 each lived inside a single prefix block, so the changeover cut them cleanly in two: the Beattie-Coyne hundred stopped at 679,644 notes when the fixed face took the denomination over, the smallest regular figure of the type after the thousand. Here is the full regular register:

Reading down that column is reading the two clocks at once. The dollar ran longest and hardest, 183,940,000 devil's face notes across both signatures. The fifty, hundred and thousand barely ran at all. And every unrounded tail, like the $20 changeover's 7,175,894 or the $5's 61,414,816, marks the exact note where a pen or a plate changed. This is the series the doctrine piece What the Mintage Cannot Count was waiting for: a famous variety that the record counted perfectly, because the variety and the printing run are the same thing.

The asterisk is born

The 1954 series hides a second debut under the drama. Until then, replacing a sheet spoiled at the printers meant manufacturing exact duplicates, serial numbers and all, and holding the batch until they arrived. In 1953 the Bank devised the modern fix: independently numbered replacement notes, printed in advance, flagged with an asterisk before the serial, issued on the $1 through $20 only. Every starred, flagged and insert replacement note collected today descends from that decision.

Replacement stocks are tiny by design, and a tiny stock cut off by a 1956 deadline produced the series keys. The blocks run from 14,400 notes down to the Coyne-Towers ✽A/C $5, which stopped at 2,400. On this site that figure is almost alone: check it against the Mintage League and only the 880 proof Morgans of 1895 sit below it. The league's cellar, compiled before this series arrived, now has a new runner-up, and it is a five-dollar bill nobody noticed in 1954, because nobody collected replacement notes before there were replacement notes to collect.

What the deadline teaches

The 1937 series taught this record that signatures make rarity; its key is the fifteen-thousand-note Osborne thousand, scarce because one man held a job briefly. The 1954 Devil's Face series makes the same point with a stranger clock. Nobody at either printing firm decided how rare these notes would be. A photograph, an honest engraver, a scandalized public and a June 1956 correction decided it, and the register simply wrote down where each press stood when the music stopped. The mintage is the only number that never changes; this is the one series where the number was set by how long a country could stand to look at it.