About Notofilia
Lookat moneytwice
Most people touch money every day and never really look at it. This site is for the ones who do — or who want to start.
The site
Notofilia is a private collection and bilingual catalogue of historical banknotes and coins, founded by Yezid Acosta.
Notofilia is a site about banknotes and coins — in Spanish and English — with a soft spot for Colombia and Latin America, whose paper money history doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves.
You’ll find a catalogue of pieces from my personal collection with good photos and the stories behind each one, a bilingual glossary, and articles about the banks that printed these notes, the artists who engraved them, and the times they lived through.
About me
Someone handed me a banknote, and printed right there on it was my birthday.
I stood there in awe — I was holding something that had been made when I was born, something that had been out in the world exactly as long as I had. Add that to a kid who already loved history, and it was a perfect match. I’ve been collecting banknotes since I was about five years old.
All these years later I’m still at it, mostly chasing Colombian banknotes now, including some 19th-century pieces from banks that stopped existing more than a century ago — the Banco de Riohacha, the Banco Hipotecario — plus coins that go back even further.
The rest of my life? I work in technology, and I once wrote a children’s book. But some part of me is still that five-year-old, holding a banknote up to the light.
“Every one of these pieces was money once. It passed through markets, pockets, wars, bad economies, and people who changed history, and it survived long enough to end up in my hands. That’s the part most people miss: the history.”
Thanks for stopping by. I hope something here makes you look twice.
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