Beautifully engraved specimen certificate from the Hotel Waldolf Astoria Corporation. This historic document was printed by the Quale and sons has an ornate border around it with a vignette of  allegorical women naxt to a globe. This item has the printed signatures of the Company’s President, Lucius Boomer and its Treasurer.

Lucius Boomer was a visionary. He was among the first hoteliers to embrace modern business practices stemming from the American Industrial Age, in effect, aligning hotel operation with then-modern corporate operations. Along these lines, he advocated for hotel education, including the Cornell School of Hotel Management and other university programs, as well as vocational programs and hotel short courses.

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.