Analysis of my Kansas City IPMS and Chicago ANA Exhibit

Hi Folks - I was originally going to post this thread in the Paper Money Forum but, since they changed their website and a troglodyte like me who just uses a laptop and can't navigate around it anymore, it looks like I'm back here on a regular basis.

Anyway, many of you know I've been a collector of Serial #1 Nationals from New York State for quite a while and, after a few trial runs, I put together an exhibit of some of my #1's for this past June's IPMS in Kansas City and, as you can see, I did OK:

Then, after incorporating a few suggestions from a couple of the real "professional" exhibitors, I put the exhibit together for the big ANA show in Chicago in August and here's how we did:

Needless to say, I was absolutely thrilled with an overall 2nd Place finish considering I was going up against over 50 other Exhibitors with a paper money exhibit at the big round-metal-disk show. (I was beaten out for 1st Place by an ancient Roman coin exhibit). Along with numerous nice compliments about the exhibit, I also was asked some questions. For instance, how long did it take to put this together? (Decades). Another question was where did I find all these notes? So, I sat down and went through my records and here's what I came up with. There were 23 #1's in the exhibit - 20 large-size, 2 small-size, and 1 uncut small-size sheet and here's where they came from:

Heritage Auctions - 4

Lyn Knight Auctions - 1

Manifest Auctions - 1

Stacks and StacksBowers Auctions - 6

Private Collector Transactions - 2

Private Dealer Transactions - 9

Now, I didn't analyze where my other #1's came from (that's another 50 or so notes) but the pattern is probably about the same. Just some food for thought as to where the "good stuff" can be found (at least as far as #1 Nationals are concerned).