Vintage 1979-1981 Caesars World Stock Certificate Las Vegas Casino Americana Collector Office Decor 📜

Size: 12 x 8 inches ~ They vary a little one to the next.

🎰 A Real Piece of the Casino Itself

I don't get many chances to sell an actual piece of a company like this one. What's in front of you is an engraved common stock certificate of Caesars World, Inc. — the corporation that stood behind Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip. Not a poster, not a reprint. A real financial document, steel-engraved by the American Bank Note Company, from the years Caesars World was opening its casino on the Atlantic City boardwalk.

I sell this one two ways, because it really did come off the transfer agent's desk in two forms, and I'd rather you pick the one you actually want than open a box and be surprised. The No Red X certificate is the larger holding — one thousand shares, with nothing drawn across the face. The Red X certificate is the smaller holding — one hundred shares, with a red crayon X struck through it, the mark a transfer clerk made when a certificate came back in and was formally cancelled on the company's books. Both versions are punch-cancelled; the No Red X piece never had the crayon mark, but it was retired the same way as every certificate in this run. Neither is a blank. Both did their job.

🌍 A Goddess, a Globe, and a Laurel Crown

Whoever designed this one leaned all the way into the Roman theme that made Caesars Palace famous. The whole certificate is wrapped in a dense blue-grey guilloche border — the fine, engine-turned scrollwork security printers use to defeat counterfeiters, the same family of pattern you'll find framing paper currency. At the top, an oval vignette shows a windswept woman in a flowing gown and cape, one arm raised, the other cradling a globe wrapped in laurel leaves. In Roman tradition the laurel wreath crowned victors and emperors — Caesar's own crown — and pairing it with a globe rather than a single building says exactly what the company wanted said: not a palace, a world.

Below her, the name reads out in bold, Roman-style lettering, marked COMMON on both shoulders. The text certifies the holder as owner of fully paid, non-assessable shares of common stock at a par value of ten cents ($.10) each, incorporated under the laws of the State of Florida, transferable in the City of New York or in Jersey City, N.J. It's countersigned by the Registrar and Transfer Company of Jersey City as transfer agent and registrar, and signed for the company by its Secretary and by its President, W. H. McElnea Jr. — a man who came up through Bankers Trust and Empire Trust in New York before he ever signed a Caesars certificate. Down in the corner of the vignette, small and easy to miss, is the engraver's own mark: the American Bank Note Company, working in intaglio, the hand-cut steel-die process that gives the lines their sharp, raised feel. That's the same tradition of engraving used on paper money, which is exactly why collectors of old financial paper — a hobby called scripophily — go looking for American Bank Note work in particular.

🏛 A Hot Dog Stand That Became a Casino Empire

Here's the part of the story the certificate only hints at. Look at the embossed seal near the signature line: CAESARS WORLD, INC. / CORPORATE SEAL / 1958 / FLA. This whole run of certificates is dated to the years 1979 through 1981, yet the seal says 1958 Florida — and that's because Caesars World didn't start out as a casino company at all.

In 1956, brothers Clifford and Stuart Perlman bought a hot dog stand on Miami Beach called Lum's for ten thousand dollars. Lum's became famous for one specific thing: hot dogs steamed in beer. It worked. By 1971 the Perlmans had grown Lum's into roughly four hundred restaurants, and they'd taken the company public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1969 — the same year they bought Caesars Palace outright, for about sixty million dollars. Caesars Palace, the Roman-fantasy resort showman Jay Sarno had opened on the Strip in 1966, was such a phenomenon that the Perlmans sold off the whole restaurant business in 1971 to John Y. Brown, then chairman of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and renamed their remaining company after its crown jewel: Caesars World, Inc. The Florida charter from the old restaurant company never changed. Only the business did. That's why a certificate issued in 1979-1981 still carries a seal dated 1958.

By the time this series of certificates was issued, Caesars World was expanding again — this time to Atlantic City, where its Boardwalk Regency opened in 1979 as the second casino on that boardwalk. And in 1980, New Jersey's Casino Control Commission refused to grant the Perlman brothers permanent gaming licenses over their ties to Miami lawyer Alvin Malnik. So Caesars World bought the Perlmans out of their own company — an 18 percent stake, for 98 million dollars. These certificates were issued in exactly those years.

The company didn't stay independent much longer, in the scheme of things. ITT bought Caesars World in 1995 for roughly 1.7 billion dollars; Starwood took over ITT in 1998; Park Place Entertainment bought the casino business in 1999. And Lum's itself, the hot dog stand that started all of this, went bankrupt in 1982 — though a Lum's kept its lights on in Bellevue, Nebraska until May of 2017, outliving the casino empire it built by nearly two decades.

🎤 The Showroom and the Fountains

Caesars Palace opened on August 5, 1966, and Andy Williams opened its 800-seat Circus Maximus showroom, built to look like the inside of Rome's Colosseum. Over the years that stage belonged to Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Judy Garland, Cher and Aretha Franklin. And on New Year's Eve 1967, a young daredevil named Evel Knievel talked his way into jumping his motorcycle over the fountains out front. He didn't stick the landing, and the crash put him in the hospital and made him a legend overnight. That's the resort this company owned.

📜 What You're Actually Holding

A stock certificate like this one is a small piece of a vanished way of doing business. Nobody frames a database entry. When paper certificates like this changed hands, they got assigned on the back, stamped by transfer agents and registrars, and eventually punch-cancelled and retired — which is exactly the life this one lived. I'd rather sell you the real, cancelled article than a blank that never did anything.

Pick the No Red X if you want the larger, one-thousand-share certificate with a clean face. Pick the Red X if you want the one-hundred-share certificate with the crayon mark that proves it actually moved through a transfer agent's hands. Either way, you're holding an engraved piece of the company that ran Caesars Palace during the classic era of the Strip.