1 Cent Ohio Sales Tax Receipt

Ohio's sales tax receipt stamps occupy a strange middle ground between fiscal paper and currency surrogate — they were issued in small denominations to facilitate exact tax collection at point of sale, a system that generated enormous print runs and almost universal discard once redeemed. The Columbian Bank Note Company, a Chicago firm with a long history of printing revenue and fiscal paper for state governments, handled production for Ohio through much of the mid-century period.

Survival rates are low not from scarcity of printing but from the opposite: these were considered trash the moment they left the register drawer.