Somebody handed albums of old banknotes in to an Edinburgh charity shop. They sold for £85,860.

The albums came into the charity’s home and fashion shop, and the staff looked through them before doing anything else. David McCormack manages the shop.

When the donation came into the shop, we all looked through the folders but didn’t know much about the banknotes, so we sent them to our eBay team in Leeds to investigate.David McCormack, shop manager

The eBay team in Leeds worked out what the shop had been given. “When we discovered their potential value, we were flabbergasted,” McCormack said.

Money you can’t spend

There were almost 160 notes from around the world, and most of them were specimens and colour trials.

A specimen is a sample note. It’s stamped SPECIMEN and punched with holes so nobody can spend it. A colour trial is a test print, made while a bank is still deciding what its note should look like.

One of them is a fifty-dollar note from the Board of Commissioners of Currency, Malaya and British Borneo, with a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth II. Printed across the top are the words “Specimen of no value”. It sold for £4,000, according to Noonans’ catalogue.

The note that made the most was a 1952 colour trial for a South African Reserve Bank £100 note, which went for £7,000. A 1947 colour trial for an Iraqi 10 dinar note also made £4,000. There was also a 1961 specimen of a Saudi 100 riyal note.

Two of the pieces are hand-painted designs for Royal Bank of Scotland notes from 1967, which the bank never went on to print, The Scotsman reported.

One has the industrialist David Dale on it, with the University of Glasgow and a statue of Lord Kelvin. The other has Archibald Campbell, the 3rd Duke of Argyll, with Edinburgh Castle and the Old Town as you’d see them from Salisbury Crags.

A little bit more than normal

The British Heart Foundation sent the albums to Noonans, an auction house in London, and the notes were sold on Wednesday 14 October. Noonans didn’t charge the charity its usual seller’s fee.

Andrew Pattison, who runs Noonans’ banknote department, said buyers paid a bit extra because the money was going to charity.

Material of this quality is extremely rare and collectors all over the world have responded extremely well, with many of the notes selling for that little bit more than normal on account of the charitable nature of the sale.Andrew Pattison, Noonans

The charity still doesn’t know who handed the albums in. Allison Swaine-Hughes, its chief commercial officer, said: “We are incredibly grateful to the donor who chose to entrust these remarkable banknotes to us.”