American Banknote "Return To Record And Specimen Department"

I have recently acquired the attached piece. While the rubber stamp in the top margin is fairly obvious as to its purpose, can anyone expand on the functions of the Record and Specimen Department, please? GLENN

Very intriguing. Also what was the history of the department? Was it active for all issues created by ABNCo?

I assume this was the regular practice. It sounds like an archive of all the work done.

Here's another example:

I'm sifting through the production category for the first time and finding lots of interesting stuff! A few years late to the party on this topic, but -- yes, KGB is exactly correct. Records and Archives was just a vast storage area for specimens of all of ABNC's work. In fact, all the banknote companies had archives like this.

I am most familiar with this rubber stamp on stock and bond specimens, so it's interesting to see it on stamps. You will also find specimens stamped "Last Specimen, Reserve 0" -- meaning this was the last archival example, so put it back when you are done! The implication is that there were often extra samples on file that salesmen might give to customers.

Here are a few specimen items with similar rubber stamps. A great amount of this kind of material came onto the market beginning in 1988, around the time ABNC was bought out by US Banknote Corp and slowly liquidated its archives in a series of auctions: https://www.coxrail.com/abn-archives.asp

I am familiar with the system of Thomas De La Rue in England. If there was an order for an already previously printed stamp. The archive department would issue some sample blocks as print and color reference. This was given to the production department and maybe other departments. After the new order was printed, this sample would be returned to the archive department.
In the Thomas De La Rue archives there were quite some shabby looking specimens, many times put together with a paperclip.
In the first order they would keep a file copy of that print. Looking at maybe 100 different file sheets in the De La Rue archives, the ones printed multiple times would have big pieces missing of the file copies. Less reprinted stamps would have less stamps missing from the sheets.