50 Francs 7th series, reserve banknote

Switzerland's seventh series was printed in quantity during the early 1980s but held back as a reserve — never formally released into circulation. The SNB maintained large strategic stocks of completed banknotes throughout the Cold War period as a contingency measure, and the entire seventh series ultimately remained in reserve until it was destroyed without ever seeing public use. That makes P#62 a genuinely unusual object: a finished, production-quality note that fulfilled no transactional purpose whatsoever.

Engraving by Pierre Schopfer, working under the Orell Füssli house that has produced Swiss federal notes without interruption since the nineteenth century.