A.G. Spalding and Bros. - Specimen Stock Certificate - Famous Sporting Goods Company
Inv# SE2426 Specimen Stock
Large size Specimen Stock printed by American Bank Note Company. Sporting Goods! Rare! Spalding is an American sports equipment manufacturing company founded by Albert Spalding in Chicago, in 1876, although is now headquartered in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Spalding currently focuses on basketball, mainly producing balls but also commercializing hoops, rims, nets and ball pump needles. Softballs are commercialized through its subsidiary Dudley Sports. In the past, Spalding has manufactured balls for other sports, such as American football, baseball, soccer, volleyball, and golf. For a brief period in the 1980s, Spalding was also a designer of aftermarket automotive wheels.
The company was founded in 1876 when Albert Spalding was a pitcher and manager of a baseball team in Chicago, the Chicago White Stockings. The company standardized early baseballs and developed the modern baseball bat with the bulge at its apex. In 1892, Spalding acquired Wright & Ditson and A. J. Reach, both rival sporting goods companies. In 1893, A.G. Spalding & Brothers purchased the Lamb Knitting Machine Company located in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts and renamed it the Lamb Manufacturing Company. It used this purchase to consolidate its skate manufactory from Newark and its gymnasium goods manufactory from Philadelphia to the Chicopee plant. Lamb, primarily engaged in manufacturing knitting machines, rifles, and egg-beaters, had been fulfilling a contract since 1890 to produce the Credenda bicycle wheel for Spalding. Spalding chose Chicopee because it was the home of the Overman Wheel Company since he acted as their distributor in the Western USA, and Overman contracted with Lamb to make wheels for its lower-end products. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spalding_(company)
Stock and Bond Specimens are made and usually retained by a printer as a record of the contract with a client, generally with manuscript contract notes such as the quantity printed. Specimens are sometimes produced for use by the printing company's sales team as examples of the firm’s products. These are usually marked "Specimen" and have no serial numbers.
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