Smith-Corona Marchant Inc. - New York

Beautifully engraved SPECIMEN certificate from Smith-Corona Marchant Inc. This historic document was printed by the Security-Colombian Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an allegorical woman sitting in the center with an allegorical man on each side of her. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's President and Treasurer.


Certificate Vignette

The Smith Corona company merged with the Marchant Calculator Co. in 1958, forming Smith Corona Marchant. In 1962, Smith Corona changed its corporate name to Smith-Corona Marchant (SCM). The company made various types of business machines including calculators machines and typewriters. SCM kept the "Marchant" name on their calculators because of the name recognition.

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates were made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that has grown in popularity over the past several years.