Beautifully engraved RARE SPECIMEN certificate from the Nordstrom. This historic document was printed by the American Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of John W. Nordstrom. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's Officers.

Certificate Vignette

In 1901, John W. Nordstrom used his stake from the Alaska gold rush to open a small shoe store in Seattle, Washington. Over the years, the Nordstrom family of employees built a thriving business on the principles of quality, value, selection and service. Today, Nordstrom is one of the nation's leading fashion retailers, offering a wide variety of fine quality apparel, shoes and accessories for men, women and children at stores across the country. They remain committed to the simple idea Scripophily.com was founded on, earning the trust of our customers, one at a time.

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 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 over the past several years.