Vintage GM General Motors Stock Certificate 1950s 1980s Futurama Vignette Detroit Americana Gift Wall Art Office Decor Auto Collector 📜

These are engraved General Motors Corporation common stock certificates - real bank-note paper, not prints. Most carry the ordinary marks of paper that did real work: a cancellation punch or two, a transfer stamp, here and there a faint pencil note in the margin. They vary a little one to the next.

🚘 What You're Getting

I stock General Motors common stock in three flavors, and each one is its own printed tier, not just a different color of the same thing. Blue is the "CERTIFICATE FOR NOT MORE THAN 10,000 SHARES" printing. Green is the "CERTIFICATE FOR LESS THAN 100 SHARES" printing, with its own tens-and-units punch column down the side. Orange is the flat "100 SHARES" printing - the one that spells ONE HUNDRED across the face. Buy one color, or all three together.

🎨 The Vignette

Every color shares the same engraved centerpiece: three overlapping male profiles facing forward, a streamlined locomotive, a low teardrop car, and a coach or delivery van stamped with a bold "GM" panel, with factory smokestacks and a curved, saucer-roofed building rising behind them. It's Streamline Moderne down to the bones - the same visual language of speed and industry GM leaned on everywhere in the mid-century. Engraved by the American Bank Note Company, printed light and airy on the blue, deeper and more bookish on the green, boldest on the orange. No embossed seal on any of them - just the engraving, the guilloché borderwork, and the officers' printed signatures.

🎡 Why I Call It the Futurama Vignette

Nothing on the certificate says "Futurama" - that's my name for it - but look at the streamlined car, the coach, the locomotive and those forward-facing profiles and you'll see where my head went. GM's actual Futurama was the "Highways and Horizons" ride at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, designed by Norman Bel Geddes: a scale model of an imagined 1960 America, viewed from moving chair-cars - 552 seats' worth at a time - gliding over automated highways and sweeping motorways while a speaker narrated "Come tour the future with General Motors." About five million people rode it, and every one of them walked out with a little round pin that read "I have seen the future." President Roosevelt sought Bel Geddes out afterward, and Bel Geddes' own book, Magic Motorways, laid out the four principles - safety, comfort, speed, economy - that show up again in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944, the law that eventually gave the country its interstates. GM went back to the Fair in 1964 with Futurama II, trading highways for lunar colonies and undersea motorways. That's the world this engraving always puts me in mind of.

🏛️ General Motors Corporation

William C. Durant founded General Motors as a New Jersey company in Flint, Michigan, in 1908, lost control of it in 1910, fought his way back in 1916 with financing from Pierre S. du Pont, and was pushed out again in 1920. That 1916 reorganization is also when the company became "General Motors Corporation, incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware" - the exact line engraved on the certificate face. Charles E. Wilson, GM's president, is the one who told a Senate committee in 1953 that for years he'd thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa - a line that got shortened in the retelling to "what's good for GM is good for America," which he never quite said.

🏦 The Banks Behind the Paper

These went through different registrars and transfer agents depending on the tier and the year, and the banks on them have their own footnotes. Among them: Bank of Delaware as registrar with Wilmington Trust Company as transfer agent - Wilmington Trust founded in 1903 by T. Coleman du Pont, whose own family's General Motors stake grew so large that the Supreme Court ordered DuPont to divest it; the shares went out to DuPont's shareholders in waves between 1962 and 1965. The Chase Manhattan Bank shows up as registrar too - a bank formed in 1955, the same year this design was copyrighted - with General Motors' own Detroit office standing in as transfer agent. And The Northern Trust Company appears as registrar with Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company of Chicago as transfer agent; Continental Illinois is the bank whose 1984 collapse was, for a while, the largest bank failure in U.S. history, and gave the country the phrase "too big to fail." GM's New York transfer office on these is 1775 Broadway - the company's own headquarters building until it moved uptown to the new General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue in 1968.

📜 What These Shares Became

The design itself dates to 1955 - GM's certificates carried a $5 par value and a different vignette before that year, and this "$1⅔"-par design replaced it. That par value stuck with GM's common stock for decades, right through certificates issued into the 1980s. It didn't survive the 2009 bankruptcy: the old General Motors Corporation became Motors Liquidation Company, and its plan cancelled the old $1⅔ common on March 31, 2011. Holders of the paper got nothing for it. What you're holding isn't a live share anymore - it's what's left of one, and a real piece of the company that sat at number one on the Fortune 500 through the 1960s.

🖌️ Three of Many

Blue, green and orange are what I carry, but they weren't GM's only colors for this design - the same certificate turns up in grey, pink, purple, peach and gold over the years.

Choose blue, green, orange, or the set of all three - a real engraved piece of General Motors, from the era when a share of stock was something you could actually hold.