Collecting Iraqi Banknotes by Prefix

Banknotes from the Iraqi Kingdom were, with the exception of the India print series from World War II, printed by Bradbury, Wilkinson & Co. in Great Britain. Thankfully for collectors print totals were well recorded, and prefix ranges can often be found on specimen notes to the firm. What few collectors know, however, is which prefixes had short print runs and should be considerably more scarcer. For example, the 1 Dinar with portrait of young King Faisal II and Kennet – al Haidari signature (Pick-18b) comes with Z prefix, as well as fractional prefixes A/1 to F/1. 900,000 Z prefixes were printed, as well as 1 million notes of each fractional prefix, except for the F/1 prefix, which saw just 40,000 notes printed before a new design was introduced. Needless to say, locating a nice example of the F/1 prefix should prove to be very challenging.