*Courtesy of Heritage Auctions

Standard 12-Subject Sheets

Series of 1928 notes were printed on 12-subject sheets consisting of 2 columns of 6 notes each. If $500 Series of 1928 Gold Certificates were printed in standard form, the following format would have been used on the first 12 notes printed and on all notes thereafter:

But, that does not appear to have been the case. In the charts below, you can see a curious pattern emerging from known serial numbers documented by 1928notes.com.

Questions

Notes appear to have been printed on one column or the other for a given serial number range. This raises some questions for which we currently have no answers.

1) Were the $500 Gold Certificates printed on half sheets?

This seems unlikely, because if this were the case, the plate position letters would have all been position letters A-F. As we can see in the alternating pattern, both columns were used.

2) Is is possible that a dual printing of stars and non-stars were used on both sheets?

Possible, but note that only 4000 stars were printed, as opposed to 420,000 standard notes. This would have meant a lot of stars were discarded -- 416,000 to be exact.

3) Dual denomination sheets were possibly used?

Nothing would seem to indicate this. The most likely candidate notes would have been other high denomination notes. But this presents a problem considering that those other denominations also commenced their printing runs on the same left-hand column.

Irregularities

Even the breaks between column shifts appear to be somewhat irregular. There are 5 discernible breaks based on the known serial numbers. The first two breaks would seem to indicate a break in intervals of 36,000. This pattern works until we get to the 3rd break, which would occur at A00108000A. As we can see from the chart above, there does not appear to be a break in this particular serial number range.

$500 Series of 1928 Gold Certificate Plate Position Letters: Updated 11-23-2019

Conclusion

For a great deal of time this was left as an open question. Thanks to Jamie Yakes, we have answers.

The high denomination gold certificates from the Series of 1928 were indeed printed in complete 12 subject sheets. According to Jamie, the BEP "applied the serial numbers consecutively by the half sheets. So for a 1,000-sheet run they would have printed serials 1-6,000 on the AF side, and serials 6,001-12,000 on the GL side." He goes on to comment on our serial number ranges. "The first two serial ranges you have listed for $500s -- 1-33598 and 37168-70152 -- indicate a 6,000-sheet print run with serials 1-36,000 printed on the AFs and 36,001-72,000 printed on the GFs."

Concerning a few other points the BEP did print some Series of 1928 sheets with both stars and non-stars present on the same sheet, but no dual denomination sheets were ever printed for this series. Thanks again to Jamie for the clarification and answers!

Additional Information

It is no surprise that we find a similar pattern on the $1,000 Series of 1928 Gold Certificates. On this denomination, the column shift only occurs once on the known serial numbers compiled by 1928notes.com.

*Courtesy of Heritage Auctions

$1,000 Series of 1928 Gold Certificate Plate Position Letters: Updated 7-30-2019