Before 1954, a spoiled sheet at the printers meant producing an exact duplicate of the ruined notes, serial numbers and all, and holding the parcel until it arrived. The Bank of Canada ended that in 1953 with a simple device: replacement notes numbered in their own series, flagged by an asterisk before the serial, printed in advance and swapped in as needed. This note is where that system entered circulation, which makes it the ancestor of every starred, X-prefix and insert replacement in modern collecting.
The published record on how many exist is not unanimous. Charlton-derived tables carry 14,400 for each signature pair; the Online Canadian Paper Money Museum estimates about 21,000 dollar replacements across both. The file leads with the per-signature figure and records the dissent rather than deciding it.
Either way, the dollar is the attainable devil's face asterisk, the one collectors actually encounter, and the usual entry point into the replacement-note habit.
A first of its kind on the commonest denomination of the series: as origin stories go, this is the affordable one. Buy the note for what it started, not as a lottery ticket.
Mintage figures: United States Mint (Annual Report of the Director of the Mint), Royal Canadian Mint records, and — for the 1935 banknote issue — Bank of Canada printage records as published in the Charlton Standard Catalogue of Canadian Government Paper Money, cross-checked across independent published references. Specifications: United States Mint coin specifications.