Articles from retired Blog
I wrote auction reviews and articles about the hobby for my Coxrail blog from 2004 to 2023. Blogs tend to take considerable time and effort to constantly turn out fresh content. On the other hand, scripophily is a hobby that is relatively slow moving.
One of the primary focuses on my blog was informing my small reader base of upcoming auctions. Looking at every lot to find under-appreciate certificates was fun, but very time-consuming. I decided to promote only those auctions that printed physical catalogs and trusted me enough to send a reiview copy.
With eBay consuming so much "oxygen" in the lower-price band of the market, major auction houses had to cut back (or abandon) and publishing expensive full-color catalogs. Most have since moved to online auction platforms like icollector and invaluable. I feel my readers now have ready access to the same kinds of information as me, so reviewing auctions became increasingly difficult to justify.
By 2023, I was hard at working converting my website to a more robust platform capable of storing and handling much more information. Therefore, with less free time, I "pulled the plug" on that site and moved articles from the blog to this section that were not time-dependent like sale reviews.
Following are titles and links to the articles I brought from the blog. I modified a majority of articles in minor ways by re-phrasing or correcting spelling errors. I tried to improve several articles with larger images. Only a handful of articles required updating because of new certificate appearances.
| Buying and selling, shipping |
| Inadequate certificate packaging (B) |
| Celebrities |
| Fisk, Assassination of Colonel James Fisk, Jr (B) |
| Vanderbilt, William Henry - article in The Daily Graphic (B) |
| Certificate features |
| Faked issuance (B) |
| Features that deserve separate listings (B) |
| Fifty. No twenty. No, Fifty (curious handwriting) (B) |
| Railroad system maps on certificates (B) |
| Round lot shares (B) |
| What can we learn from serial numbers? (B) |
| Certificate features, cancellations |
| How do you know if certificates were cancelled? (B) |
| How much do cancellations matter? (B) |
| Certificate types, bonds |
| Digging deeper in bearer and registered bonds (B) |
| Flexibility of bearer and registered bonds, The (B) |
| New York state revenues on bonds (B) |
| Terminology - coupon bonds vs bearer bonds (B) |
| Certificate types, stocks |
| Fully paid and non-assessable (B) |
| Companies |
| Adirondack Company bond payout (B) |
| Great West Exposition Train (B) |
| "Tap" railroads (B) |
| Famous vignettes |
| The Crossing (B) |
| View at North Bend, Ohio (B) |
| Hobby, general |
| Arguing against jargon (B) |
| Hucksterism in our hobby (B) |
| Join the International Bond & Share Society (B) |
| Origin of the word 'Scripophily' (B) |
| Understanding the "collecting gene" (B) |
| What does the word "rare" mean? (B) |
| Illustrations, vignettes, famous vignettes |
| 'The Crossing' (B) |
| Peripheral documents |
| Marion Savages' plea for more money (B) |
| Pricing |
| What's it worth? (B) |
| What are collectibles worth when they don't sell? (B) |
| Printing and engraving |
| American Bank Note Co security printing (B) |
| Engraver of Baltimore & Ohio certificates (B) |
| Project, general |
| Where do new varieties come from? (B) |
| Where does new information come from? (B) |
| Rail-related |
| Reuben Wells purpose-built locomotive (B) |