People have actually been raising
money in these ways since the invention of writing, if not earlier.
Assignment of shares and loans at interest are recorded on Sumerian clay
tablets. That's old: 4500 BC. The Hebrews did it, such transactions
being mentioned in the Bible. So did the Greeks and the Romans.
The practices continued, despite religious prohibitions on the part of
Christians and Muslims, through the middle ages and the Renaissance.
Major public loans and stock
offerings began to be floated during the 18th century, and were big business
in the next. Now of course the trading of these assignments is THE
business of the world, overshadowing, in our attention if not in reality,
the actual creation of valuable things.
COLLECTING
For every object there is a
group of collectors and a network of dealers to supply them. The
"marks of assignment" and "tokens of debt" are collected by a small number
of people world wide. I estimate the number is less than 100,000.
(How did I arrive at that figure? Pure gut guess.)
This is a rather chaotic market
without catalogs, price levels, or clubs to speak of. A few dealers
are attempting to generate some organization, but at this point, in my
OPINION, their efforts have as yet borne only personal results.
The bulk of material available
is 20th century. A lesser quantity of 19th century documents can
be had, but anything older is generally rare. Partnership papers
and interest-loan documents are fairly normal documents of Renaissance
Italy and Spain. There are lots of them in the old libraries of Europe,
but this doesn't mean they are available to collectors.
Certificates become available
to collectors in four ways:
1) they are cancelled and released.
Often the cancelled certificates are kept on file at brokerage houses or
with the parent company, and only become available as hobby fodder upon
the demise of the firm. This is a common practice, but not a general
one,
2) the issuing agency goes out
of business, or never starts up in the first place, leaving unissued certificates.
A subset of this process is when a bond issuing agency goes out of business,
leaving worthless, unredeemable certificates. Nations do this on
occasion, as witness pre-1949 China, pre-1917 Russia, and pre-1910 Mexico,
3) they are issued as specimens
for educational purposes,
4) they become part of an estate.
Some old certificates picked up this way are still valid, and there are
people who make their living buying old documents, verifying them, and
converting them.
The documents are peddled by
dealers of various degrees of pretension, ranging from wholesale jobbers
who use classified ads in small hobby journals to people who put out expensive,
photo-illustrated auction catalogs.
Collectors sort themselves into
a few catagories too. Many people are attracted to the artistic vignettes
which often adorn the certificates. Others seek out various topical
themes, some popular choices including animals, humans of a given gender
in a given stage of accouterment, modes of transport (especially railroads),
and mines (especially gold). Some people collect only within a certain
industry, others only certificates printed by a specific company (American
Banknote Company, for example), and others collect signatures that have
meaning to them.
The vignettes are interesting
for a number of reasons. They are often quite well executed, a tendency
which seems to become greater the further back you look in time. Another
cute aspect is the fact that they are early examples of what we currently
call "clip art," in that many of the figures and details used are stock
items, rearranged to suit the needs of the issuing company. It is
thus possible to form a collection of the same guy sitting and thinking,
or the same lady with artful drapery and wistful expression, from a number
of companies, and even nations. (The American Banknote Company was
particularly fond of this procedure, and used it on paper money as well.)
CONDITION
Condition is determined according
to normal grading rules for paper money: 1 fold is extremely fine, 2 folds
is very fine, etc. There are some provisos, however. Cancelled items
frequently have holes punched in them, staple holes are normal, and big
certificates are subject to edge tears. Some items are issued folded,
so that an unused item will still be technically XF. Allowances are
usually made, and the dealer will consider a grade of Unc to be justified
for such items.
Many bond certificates, and
some early shares as well, come with attached dividend coupons, and often
a bond will turn up with some of the coupons clipped. This will usually
be noted in the description. A given item will frequently be available
only in a clipped state.
PRICES
Within limits, valuations are
more or less arbitrary. An item that shows up in a fancy auction catalog
with an impressive price on it might show up in a wholesale lot for next
to nothing. I myself have seen wholesale lots of railroad certificates
offered at less than $1.00 each, some of the same items showing up in dealer
catalogs at $25.00 and more. Occasionally someone gets their hands
on all available specimens of something, and can then hold a price line.
This seems to be the case with the Ringling Brothers shares, the holder
of which continues to ask an arm and a leg for them. In my opinion
it pays to be circumspect when contemplating a large outlay on these, as
patience and research will often yield an extreme saving.
The vast majority of available
share certificates are from American, Canadian, and British companies,
and date from the 1940s-70s. French and German certificates are not
uncommon. Most other countries have stock issuing companies: Egypt,
India, Pakistan, Israel, Japan, Argentina, etc., probably more than 180.
Unfortunately, you will find that most of them are not easy to find, so
a "share cert from every country" collection will be a difficult set to
create.
Bond certificates are usualy
unavailable, having been surrendered upon redemption. The most common
bonds are those issued by defunct agencies, including the aforementioned
nations among others, and many of these are quite cheap.
What do I mean by cheap?
Basically, anything I sell on my "Anything Anywhere" lists is cheap.
Chinese National Lottery Loans are cheap, as are Russian 1916 War loans,
most American stock certificates since 1940, etc. At the other end,
the abovementioned Ringling certificate is usually offered for more than
$500.00, as are papers bearing the signatures of notables such as J.P.
Morgan, J.D. Rockefeller, etc.
STORAGE
This can be a problem, because
the things are big. Many certificates will fit in a postal sheet file,
but some items are even bigger than that, and some bonds are made of multiple
sheets. I run into a related problem every time I need to ship the
big ones. I guess I could roll them up and put them in a tube, but
then the recipient would have to flatten them out, a chore I'm loth to
lay before my clients. And I don't believe in folding things that have
not been previously folded.
On the other hand, the artwork
is often superb, and of a scale suitable for framing, which feature is
usually not the case with paper money.
OVERALL OPINION
These things are interesting.
I can't imagine anyone putting together a catalog. Can you?
So many companies (etc.), most of them defunct, having issued who knows
how many things. Let's not even mention the fraudulent issuers, the
financing schemes that didn't get off the ground, etc. While it is pretty
easy to get a nice looking collection together it will take more than a
bit of research, in many cases, to figure out what you have. This
will be especially true with 19th century shares, whose issuers, if they
are still in existance, will often have gone through several name changes.
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Bob Reis
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