Beautifully engraved SPECIMEN certificate from
Bell Canada dated 1977. This historic document was printed by the British American Banknote Company and has a vignette of two allegorical figure flying next to a globe with rings running around it. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's President and Secretary and is
over 25 years old.
Certificate Vignette
BCE is Canada’s largest communications company. It has 25 million customer connections
through the wireline, wireless, data/Internet and satellite services it provides, largely under
the Bell brand. BCE’s media interests are held by Bell Globemedia, including CTV and The
Globe and Mail. As well, BCE has e-commerce capabilities provided under the BCE Emergis
brand. BCE shares are listed in Canada, the United States and Europe.
About SpecimensSpecimen 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 we 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 grown in popularity and realized nice appreciation in value over the past several years.