Scripophily Puzzle No. 4 - solution

In Puzzle No. 4 we were looking for a novel. This time, three scripophily detectives gave the correct answer. "A bit too easy" I was told. 

In order to solve the puzzle, I provided you two visual cues : details from the designs of a bond and a share certificate. Let's have a look at them.

The first image shows a logo consisting of the interlaced letters W and L flanked by two lions and a banner underneath. The banner shows some words. Click the image to enlarge it. You can't distinguish all the words but Compagnie, des, Lits and Européens must be clear.

Googling these words brings up links to the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. In the Google Images results pane you'll find a similar logo, and likely, an image of one of the company's bond certificates like the one shown here.

The Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens, in short CIWL, was founded by the Belgian Georges Nagelmackers in 1872. His business pioneered in luxurious on-train catering and sleeping car services. CIWL operated the famous long-distance Orient Express that originally ran from Paris to Constantinople (Istanbul).

The second image shows a fragment from a share certificate. We can read [H]ôtel de Constantinople, and you can also detect a stamp that mentions Société Française des Grands Hotels Internationaux. All-knowing Google tells us that we are talking about the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul. 

The Pera Palace was built in 1892 for the CIWL. The company needed a suitable hotel at the final destination of its Orient Express. Among its famous guests were : Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Ernest Hemingway, Queen Elizabeth II, Alfred Hitchcock and Jacqueline Kennedy.

Using the words Wagons-Lits and book, or even novel, in your next Google search yields many results to multiple publications. So does Pera Palace combined with the words book or novel. Obviously, both are popular subjects.

A better idea was to search for the combination of all these words : Wagons-Lits, Pera Palace and novel, or, even better, Orient Express and novel. The outcome leads you to the solution : Murder on the Orient Express, a novel written by the English writer Agatha Christie.

Christie's famous book appeared in 1934. It brings the story of Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective, who returns from the Middle East on the Orient Express. The train is stopped by heavy snowfall and a murder is discovered. Poirot's trip home to London is interrupted to solve the murder.

Agatha Christie stayed on several occasions at the Pera Palace from 1926 through 1932. It is said that she wrote there Murder on the Orient Express in her favored room, 411. Did you know you can still book her room for your stay in Istanbul ? 

Did Agatha Christie ever travel on the Orient Express ? As a matter of fact, yes, she did, more than once. Her first journey on the Orient Express was in late 1928, only a few months before a blizzard, near Cherkeskoy, Turkey, stranded another Orient Express for six days. And in December 1931, when Christie returned from her husband's archaeological dig at Nineveh, aboard an Orient Express, sections of railway track were washed away by heavy rainfall flooding. 

In scripophily, we have seen bonds and shares that were issued to or signed by famous authors like Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain. Wouldn't it be a baffling mystery if a share issued to Agatha Christie would turn up in suspicious circumstances ?

To conclude, scripophily detectives DB and RS provided a correct answer, but is was SC who was the first to solve puzzle no 4.  Great job everyone. You are now entitled a portion of "eternal fame".

F.L.

PS 

• A nice collection of Wagons-Lits scripophily can be seen here on Scripocollections.com 
• Read about the Royal Mint's commemorative coin of Agatha Christie on CoinsWeekly 

 

Previous posts

• Poll results - Collecting motives 
• Watermarks in scripophily - introduction 

HWPH kicks off '21 with large scripophily auction

Auctioneer Matthias Schmitt has compiled pretty much as 2000 lots of mainly antique bonds and shares for his 58th sale. The online event runs till 30 January, 10 AM. 

Collectors seek these genuine securities for their historic values or artistic features. I'll show you an Italian example from the auction of the first type later, but to start with, here is one of the latter type.

The SA Italiana per l'Impianto e l'Esercizio del Giardino Zoologico in Roma was founded in 1909. Today it is known as Bioparco di Roma. Its shares feature a gorgious vignette of wild animals, and sixteen others interacting with exuberant scrollwork and foliage. Click the image to enlarge. Creator of this Stile Liberty work was Giambattista Conti, aka Giovanni Battista Conti (1878-1970). He was known for his religious works and as an illustrator of children books. He became Director of the Vatican Restoration Institute. This rare certificate for 10 founders' share , lot 773 in the auction, starts at €1,000. 

HWPH is known for its Russian offerings and starts the feast with more than 250 lots from Russia and the former USSR. Two examples : 

• L(ot)116 A 5-shares certificate, 1898, from the Rigaer Commerz-Bank, unusual large underprint  the imperial double-headed eagle holding the arms of the city of Riga, then still part of the Russian Empire.
• A specimen bond from the Soviet Union's 1925 Internal Loan for the Reconstruction of the Economy, multicoloured Art Nouveau design, three vignettess, L151.

One of the Russian highlights is L154, a specimen bond from the 9% railway loan of 1927. The loan was issued to finance railway extensions connecting Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan with the Trans-Siberian Railway. The bond has a denomination of 25 Chervonets, a currency, fully convertible and backed by the gold standard, that was introduced by the Soviet Union to stabilize the hyperinflation. 

A major part of the sale consists of scripophily items related to Germany. Actually there are 700 of them. These can easily be queried online by means of key words like 'Freiburg', yielding 3 results, or 'Leipzig', 16 results. 

Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, AEG, originated in 1882 when Emil Rathenau acquired licenses to use some of Thomas Edison's lamp patents in Germany. This extremely rare share from 1890, L917, bears Rathenau's facsimile signature. L918, a share in another Berlin company, has Rathenau's original signature. Rathenau died in 1915 when AEG pioneered in the development of aircraft and soon thereafter in film projectors as well. 

Nearly 300 lots represent scripophily from the USA, some picks :

• L1714 shows a share number 1 in The Magirus Corporation of America, issued in 1926, and with vignette of a fire engine. Conrad Dietrich Magirus, born in Ulm, Germany, was the inventor of the mobile fire ladder. Today, the Magirus M68L is the fire engine with the highest turntable ladder in the world with a range of 68 meters.
• The Los Angeles, San Diego and Yuma Railway Company, 1890 stock certificate, L1711, rare
• The tracks of the Virginia and Tennessee Rail Road, a company that played a strategic role for the Confederacy, were destroyed during the American Civil War and later rebuilt. Its $1000 bond from 1853, shows off some of the finest vignettes on US railway securities. L1801, interesting start price at €40.
• A section of 27 Confederate States of America bonds with start prices at €20 to €40, L1618 through 1644

The auction counts no less than eight 'piano' lots : 563, 1023, 1139, 1213, 1567, 1578, 1773 and 1886. This share in the Schomacker Piano Forte Manufacturing Company was issued in 1894. Pianists and high society figures like President Ulysses S. Grant preferred these fine and award-winning instruments. Schomacker pianos were called the “Gold String” pianos. H. W. Gray, who signed this share as President, patented a technique wherein the piano strings were gold plated through a process called electro-plating. The other signature we see here is the one of Henry C. Schomacker, son of Johan Heinrich Schomacker, founder of the business. L1773 

The offerings present bonds and shares from many more countries. Let me further mention some more noteworthy collectibles :

• UK : One of the oldest Cunard Steam-Ship Company shares seen, 1888, with ship vignette, L532
• Italy : Gucci Group NV, Dutch Gulden specimen stock certificate , vignettes of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, and Gucci craftsman inspecting a Gucci handbag, L598
• Czechoslovakia : L727, Prvni Pražský Měštanský Pivovor, freely translated : The First Prague Civic Brewery, 1930, multicolor print with brewing vignetttes and of course, a drinking King
• The sale includes a nice selection of Egyptian scripophily.

The Monte di Pietà, a church-run lending institution founded in Italy's 15th century, became a model for many charity institutions. Called “Monte’s” these organizations obtained their funds by means of bonds called “Luoghi di Monte” and evolved into banks and lending institutions. The bonds were registered, and guaranteed the investor a type of life annuity. This Monte non vacabile del Sale della Città di Firenze was issued as early as 1699! The loan was guaranteed by income from taxes on salt (Sale) and bears the arms of the House of Medici. L895 

Of course, there is much more to tell, but the best way is to see for yourself. Here are the auction details:

• Date : 30 Januari 2021, online auction
• Further info and catalogs, see here on HWPH. 
• Live bidding is possible through Invaluable.com, see here, where you can find high quality images of the lots.

F.L.

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Poll results - Collecting motives

Do you prefer Beauty or are you more satisfied with A Good Bargain? When it comes to collecting what do you prefer? 

On the occasion of this blog's 10th anniversary, I launched in May 2020 an online poll about five collecting motives :  

• Scarcity
• Beauty
• A Good Bargain
• Collection Completeness
• and Historical Significance. 

These resulted in ten possible combinations: scarcity-beauty, scarcity-a good bargain, etc. For each combination the participant was asked to choose between one or both, in other words, which one he or she preferred.

I leave it up to you to decide to which collecting motive the above share corresponds. The Ford Motor Company of Canada gained all Ford patent rights and selling privileges to all parts of the British Empire other than Great Britain and Ireland. Its share shows the company's sales markets in the British Empire on both hemispheres. It was issued in 1932. That year Adolf Hitler obtained German citizenship, the Kreuger & Toll business empire collapsed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its lowest level of the Great Depression and Gandhi, in jail, began his first anti-untouchability fast. 

I believed that the poll questions asked were relevant for banknote, coin, and stamp collectors as well. Thus, I promoted my poll also through the International Bond and Share Society (IBSS) and on a number of numismatic online audiences as well, such as CoinsWeekly, Numismatic Bibliomania Society’s E-Sylum newsletter, a IBNS discussion group, and several scripophily Facebook groups.

It took a few months, but all together 123 people cast their votes. In addition to questions on collecting motives, I started the poll with some general questions to have a better idea of the participants. 

Though poll participation was anonymous, I asked about the participant's country. People responded from at least 20 countries. Top 3 locations were USA, 29%, Germany, 16% and UK, 11%. See the Poll Participants table for the details. 

On the question Are you a member of a scripophily society? 41% replied they were not. But all 8 Belgian participants were members of a scripophily society, wonderful.

The next question queried the participants for their IBSS membership : 

• 56% confirmed they were members. 
• 28% said they were not and “didn’t care”.
• The remainder, 15% or 19 participants, replied they were not IBSS members but “wanted to find out more about IBSS”. In this category we find 2 Belgians, 3 Germans, 1 Indonesian, 1 Dutchman, 1 Filipino, 2 Poles, 1 UK citizen and 6 Americans.

On the question How long have you been a collector of scripophily? 

• 82% said ‘5 years or more’.  I'll call these group "the experienced" ones. 
• 6% indicated they ‘did not collect scripophily’. 
• 15 participants -12%- said ‘less than 5 years’. These are the "starters". Of the latter group, 5 were from the USA. Bravo!

Now what about the collecting motives? Which one is the absolute winner? Do we have the same results for the top 3 locations? Are there any differences between our "starters" and "the experienced" ? Let’s find out.

I used the following method to derive a ranking. For each one of the participants I counted how many times a motive was chosen in the participant’s comparisons. For example, if someone choose Beauty over Scarcity, then Beauty deserved one point, Scarcity zero. This led to 2460 scores : 123 participants * 10 pair comparisons * 2 motives.

And the winner is…

1 Collection Completeness, 332 points

2 Historical Significance, 323 pts

3 Scarcity, 260 pts

4 Beauty, 159 pts

5 A Good Bargain, 156 pts

The overall winner in the contest is Collection Completeness, closely followed by Historical Significance.  

But the numbers also revealed that there are a two nuances. 

1. The group of the American respondents, 36 of them, however preferred Historical Significance above Collection Completeness. 
2. When we analyze the results by the number of years a person is collecting, only one motive prevailed. All 15 participants collecting less than 5 years - our "starters" - strongly preferred Historical Significance above all the other preferences.

Who are the tailenders ? 

This might be a surprise but Beauty and A Good Bargain are apparently less important than the other ones when it comes to collecting motives. Even more, this finding applies to both our starters and the experienced. 

This Ford Canada share may trigger one or more collecting motives. There is a lot to tell about. As you can see in this vignette, the Indian subcontinent is marked. One of Ford Canada's subsidiaries was Ford India Private Ltd where production began in 1926. An extraordinary Ford model was used by Mahatma Gandhi after he settled in Sevagram in 1936. There was no road to Sevagram and during rains people had to walk in knee-deep mud to the place, or use an ox cart to get there. The industrialist Jamnalal Bajaj, a close associate of Gandhi, arranged for a special vehicle to transport VIPs to Sevagram. It consisted of a sawn-off rear half of an old Ford car, drawn by oxen. They called it the 'Oxford'. In 1941 automobile magnate Henry Ford would write Gandhi a letter to tell him how much he admired Gandhi. 

With this poll I did not reach collectors from South America, Africa and scripophily countries France, Russia, and China. It would be interesting to repeat the experiment on a future occasion and include a version in Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese.

My sincere thanks to all who participated and spread the word. I hope you found it as interesting as I did.

Happy New Year !

F.L. 

Previous posts

• Unleash your detective skills with scripophily puzzle no. 4! 
• Osakekirjat Kertovat, Finnish scripophily book review