Grove Koger

Today’s post is a lightly edited version of a piece I wrote for the Winter 2011 issue of Boise magazine.

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You or your broker may keep an active file of your stocks and bonds, or you may let a mutual fund do your investing for you. Or you may have a nearly forgotten certificate or two in an old drawer. You may check the markets several times a day, or you may never give them a thought. In any case, trading in securities—stocks and bonds and the like—makes the American world go round.

The practice goes back to the ancient Romans, but it hit its stride in the seventeenth century, with the rise of an audacious seventeenth-century venture, the Dutch East India Company. Sometimes referred to as the VOC for its Dutch name, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, it was chartered by the Dutch government in 1602 and given a monopoly over trade in South and Southeast Asia.

The VOC’s aim was to wrest control of the fabulously valuable trade in East Indian spices from the Portuguese and keep it in Dutch hands. Outfitting a ship to sail halfway round the world and back again was a costly venture, and the chances of shipwreck or other misadventure were great. So sharing the dangers as well as the profits made good sense. The Dutch grasped the principle quickly and thoroughly, and although a number of other European countries soon jumped on the trading company bandwagon, the VOC was enormously profitable for a long stretch of its 200-year lifespan.

Now you may be wondering where art comes into this business of business. If you invest in any concern, you naturally want a receipt or some other sort of proof of your investment—and the more official-looking, the better. What’s currently touted as the oldest surviving example of such proof is a VOC certificate dated September 9, 1606, and bearing suitably impressive signatures and annotations.

Most certificates issued prior to 1835 were printed in austere black-on-white. But as time went by, multicolored certificates became common. Artists were hired to created suitable designs that skilled engravers then etched into the plates from which the certificates were printed. There tended to be lots of scrollwork, and there might be small vignettes of suitable subjects—locomtives in the case of railroad companies, or busy factories in the case of manufacturers. The goal, of course, was to play up the trustworthiness and potential profitability of the company.

Some companies couldn’t afford their own designs and instead relied on certificates printed in common designs Those that I’ve found in my parents’ papers, for instance, are stock in more ways than one—generically decorated forms with blank spaces in which any company could print its name and other particulars. Alas for the romance of business, printed certificates have largely been replaced by electronic book entries. The record is out there someplace in virtual space, but it’s not in your desk drawer.

The collection and study of old stocks and bonds is called scripophily, and those engaged in it are scripophilists. The hobby is only a few decades old, and in fact the first sale of nonvaleurs—certificates of companies that have failed or been absorbed or gone through some other legal change of identity—was held in Germany in the mid-1970s. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that a VOC certificate four years older than the 1006 example mentioned above somehow “disappeared” from the Amsterdam city archives within a few years of that sale.

Scripophilists fall into several groups. Some are students of business history in general, while others might be interested in a particular industry or a particular part of the world. Or they might simply be intrigued by the artwork, which frequently makes certificate suitable for framing.

Because there are so many old certificates out there, and because scripophily is such a new hobby, you can find plenty of examples on eBay and similar online auction sites for under $10. Many of those with attractive vignettes are available for less than $20, while those with particularly compelling historical associations go for more. Beautifully printed certificates from the Trasmediterránea ferry line, on whose ships Maggie and I have sailed from time to time, run to only $30 or so. At the other end of the scale, I’ve come across a reference to a 1902 certificate from the Ezekiel Air Ship Manufacturing Company whose value is estimated at $20,000! (In case you’re wondering, one of the company’s planes may have taken to the air before Orville Wright made his famous 1903 flight.)

If you’d like to learn more about scripophily, the site of the International Bond and Share Society at http://wwwscripophily.org/ is a good place start.

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Today’s post features images from (top to bottom) the Compañia Trasmediterránea (Barcelona, Spain); the Compañia del Norte Africano (Melilla, Spain); Celulosas la Albufera (Palma de Mallorca, Spain); and Savana (Bordeaux, France, but operating in Pondicherry, French India). Melilla, by the way, is a Spanish city on the northern coast of Africa.