Over the past few decades, several dedicated collectors of Canadian paper money have scanned the marketplace and taken inventory of available chartered bank notes. They sifted through auction catalogues and dealer inventories to generate lists of known surviving notes of specific banks and individual issues. The rarity of many chartered notes makes the work of organizing lists of surviving examples relatively easy. However, that alone does not diminish the accomplishments of these collectors, some of whom have been working on these lists for several decades. Whether a note has a surviving population of 3 or 300 different examples, the work that goes into tracking these notes is no less arduous, and these dedicated collectors deserve the kind of respect and thanks that mere words fail to express.

        Below, you will find links to rare chartered note registers for certain banks and issues. Registers do not exist for all banks and issues as it is simply impossible to gather information over such a large number of unique issues. There are many holes that need to be filled by future collectors. Perhaps the lists below will serve as a starting point in collecting and disseminating this vital information.

        THESE REGISTERS DO NOT CONTAIN INFORMATION THAT IS 100% ACCURATE. Nobody can know for sure how many surviving examples exist of a certain note. There are many reasons why a note may be unknown to the world at large. It may be "lost" or hidden in some long-forgotten documents and is waiting to be found. It may be locked away in a private collection or an institutional collection that has not been documented. It may have traded hands several times away from the open market where its information could be recorded. Some of the registers are considered "mature" because no new listings have been added for many years. Many of the registers are still very green or preliminary in nature, meaning that information has been collected for only a few years or less, and new nots are being added to these lists with regularity. It is easy to forget that certain notes have been known to be rare for decades, whereas other rare notes have been "hidden" or "sleeper" rarities that have only just come to light. A good example of the latter type of rare note is the Bank of Montreal 1931 $20 note.

        MOST OF THE INFORMATION IN THE REGISTERS COMES FROM THE CANADIAN PAPER MONEY SOCIETY'S QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER. The authors of the registers are Harry Eisenhauer and Robert J Graham. The CPMS intends to publish a separate volume where previously-published registers are compiled and updated. We have been waiting for years for this volume to be made available. In the meantime, I have taken it upon myself to put the registers online. At first, I did this for my own convenience and personal use. When the paper money market heated up and prices realized for rare notes began to soar, incidents of seller incredulity in using and abusing data from the registers became more common. And therein lies the one major weakness of the published registers: they are "static" in the sense that the printed versions included in the CPMS newsletter become outdated very quickly. For example, when a prelininary register lists 20 examples of a certain rare note, it is common practice for incredulous and highly dubious persons, seeking a dominant marketing strategy with which to increase their asking prices, to quote the register as though the information within it is completely accurate and unchangeable, even if the register is several years old. Such sellers will make the claim even if several reports of additional examples have been made since the register was published, and sometimes even if their own note does not appear in the register! While there is no way to prevent note sellers from making unprovable or just downright bogus claims, it becomes that much more appropriate to put the registers online and to update them when new information becomes available. Enabling potential buyers with new information decreases the chances that they will be fooled by a crooked seller.

        While the details and provenances of the notes in the registers are known fairly accurately (minus some typos and other minor errors), the grades given with the notes are entirely subjective. In some cases, the authors of the registers own the notes or have come in direct contact with the notes listed, in which case the grade and other comments relating to condition can be accepted as accurate. Most of the time, the stated grade is taken directly from the seller, and it is no secret that some sellers are very conservative (like Jeffrey Hoare Auctions) whereas others grade the way Salvador Dali paints (i.e., very creatively). The rise of Internet auctions like eBay in the past several years has given us the ability to judge the conditions of notes for ourselves, but this is far from a scientific practice as images can be manipulated or they can be simply deceiving as very few sellers have a high degree of expertise in using digital equipment. Hence all grade descriptions in the registers must be taken with a grain of salt. It should also be noted that many rare notes become "enhanced" over time (i.e. washed, pressed, trimmed, restored), and others are subjected to third-party grading. In the former case, the registers become extremely useful in tracking down a note's original condition prior to being subjected to enhancements. In the case of third-party grading, information about a note's true condition becomes lost with time.

        If you are interested in seeing a gallery of notes that have changed condition over time, click here.