Trimming Banknote Sheets in 1910

Trimming banknote sheets in 1910. Here the women on the left are feeding sheets of National Bank Notes into trimming machines with the women on the right collecting them.

The interesting thing about these 4-subject sheets is that they are not all of the same denomination. These sheets have three $10 notes and one $20 note.

This was not unusual for National Bank Notes. These notes were special-ordered by the National Banks issuing them as needed and would order multiples of certain denominations a few thousand at a time. So, for efficiency, plates would hold multiple denominations to minimize the press work for these short print runs. By the way, the National Banks also paid for the production of the notes, including the creation of the plates.

Such plate arrangements make no sense today as runs are in the billions of notes. Also, I've never figured out how they managed the numbering of the notes on these multi-denomination sheets.