A warm welcome to all visitors to my site.
I am Patrick Smeekens and I started collecting paper money in 1999. My native language is Dutch, so please forgive me for any language mistakes I make. I do my best, that's all I can do.
I started collecting banknotes from all over the world in 1999. After a while, a fellow collector asked me "why do you collect the whole world?". After some consideration, I told him it was because I think there are so many beautiful notes from everywhere. He suggested I focus on just one country, in which I have a special interest. The result would be a more specialised collection, at least as nice as my original collection, but probably even nicer.
At the time, I chose banknotes from Libya because I worked for an exporter and a colleague of mine, who had to be in Libya regularly, was able to get banknotes directly from the source, and took them back to the Netherlands for me.
After a while, I expanded my collection from Libya to Iraq, Iran, Egypt, South Africa and the West African States.
I am fond of collecting variants within a single type. This results in a collection that contains many variants of each type, and I consider my collection that I have built up from these countries a collection I am proud of.
Several years ago, I started collecting banknotes bearing the portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. That has since become quite a collection too.
Most collectors seem a bit introverted and collect only for themselves, I am not like that. As a result of my need to connect with as many like-minded collectors as possible, I started a facebook group called "worldbanknotesforsale" in 2016. In November 2018, I added this group to the community. I had a logo designed and had this website set up, with no expertise on my side in website design, I asked a good friend to do it for me. So forgive me if it's not all state of the art. Remember, I am a banknote collector and not a web designer.
Feel free to email me your messages and offers for banknotes to me soon.
Kind regards, Patrick Smeekens