1 Quetzal 6 digits serial number

Waterlow & Sons printed this series just two years before the firm collapsed — absorbed by De La Rue in 1961 following a spectacular fraud case in which Waterlow had been duped into printing duplicate Portuguese banknotes for a con artist in the 1920s, a liability that haunted the company's finances for decades. By 1959 Waterlow was still producing work for several Latin American central banks, but the Guatemala contract was among their final commissions.

The six-digit serial format is an earlier numbering convention; later Quetzal issues adopted longer alphanumeric prefixes as circulation volumes grew.