Forget neckties and fruitcakes:

This holiday, give a historic gift!

Vintage stock and bond certificates from Scripophily.com are a unique gift idea that the recipient will never forget.

These original, authentic artifacts of business and political history may date back to the 19th century and are beautifully engraved, with wonderful vignettes (decorative pictures) and ideal for framing. They may represent shares of company stock or funds raised to support public projects, social causes – even war efforts. Older certificates are usually hand signed, sometimes by famous personalities.

Bob Kerstein, a former communications executive and now CEO of Scripophily.com, became interested in antique “scrip” – stock and other financial certificates – after seeing Confederate bonds at a Civil War show. He noted that Gilded Age entrepreneurs traveled the country by rail or stagecoach, hawking beautiful, ornately engraved stock certificates in order to raise funds for their corporate ventures.

“It’s almost like they went to extremes to make the documents professional looking, engraved with nice vignettes,” sometimes marking them “payable in gold” to reflect the companies’ financial standing of their companies, Kerstein explained. “It gave people a false sense of security (so to speak), because they didn’t have the gold set aside; they’d only convert them to dollars.”

Scripophily.com’s customers include not only people in the financial community are but also people with a connection to a particular company or cause. Here are just a few examples …

• For the sports fan: a 1914 certificate for five shares in the Federated Baseball Club of Baltimore (a.k.a. the Baltimore Terrapins); an unissued 1922 certificate for the American League Baseball Club of New York (the New York Yankees); a 1927 specimen certificate for the Worthington Golf Ball Company of Elyria, Ohio.
   
• For the Civil War scholar: a City of Boston acknowledgment of donations to the Union effort, dated 1861; an 1865 State of New York soldier bond (to finance bounties paid to enlistees), hand signed by state comptroller (later governor) Lucius Robinson; various Confederate bonds.
   
• For the film and radio buff: a 1919 specimen certificate for Goldwyn Pictures Corporation (predating MGM); a 1929 unissued preferred-stock certificate for the W. C. Fields Producing Company; an early 1924 Radio Corporation of America (RCA) speciman certificate.
   
• For the car and plane enthusiast: a 1930 certificate for 25 shares in the Mono-Ford Aircraft Corporation; a 1924 French certificate (“Action de Cent Francs”) for the Citroën Taxi Car Company; a 1940 certificate for 17 shares in the Boeing Airplane Company.
   
• For the Judaica collector: a 1901 share warrant for the Jewish Colonial Trust with four vignettes, including one of the Western Wall; a Confederate $2 note with an engraving of the Confederacy’s Jewish secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin; 1929 stock certificates for the Jewish Tribune Company.

           
            Scripophily has over 13,000 stock and bond certificates to choose from. They also offer a framing service, so your gift will be ready to hang – a great conversation piece for the home or office.

Scripophily.com - The Gift of History is the Internet's leading buyer and seller of collectible stock and bond certificates and has had items on loan for display in the Smithsonian's Museum of Financial History in New York, been featured on CNBC, USA Today, Baltimore Sun, Washington Post and in many other media publications. The company also offers an old stock research service at OldCompany.com and also offers high resolution scans for publications. Scripophily.com has over 13,000 different selections including categories such as Frauds, Scandals, Bankruptcies, Dot Coms, as well as the more traditional areas such as Railroads, Telephone, Entertainment, Sports, Manufacturing, Mining, Utilities, Oil and Gas, Retail, Tobacco, Food, Banks, Insurance and others.

           Scripophily.com was founded by Bob Kerstein who has more than 25 years of senior management experience in the Cellular, Cable TV, Satellite, Internet, Professional Sports and Entertainment Industries. Bob is also the President of the Professional Scripophily Traders Association (PSTA).
 

Want to give the gift of history? Visit www.scripophily.com and search by subject, company or individual name, or call 1-888-STOCKS6 for more information.  For more information on Scripophily.com?, visit www.scripophily.com,  www.scripophily.net or http://www.bob.com or call 1-703-579-4209.