By Wall Street Collectors Bourse….
OCTOBER 22-24, 2015 AT THE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN FINANCE
The 5th Annual Wall Street Bourse, a numismatic event for lovers of financial history, will be larger this year on the Grand Mezzazine of the Museum of American Finance at 48 Wall Street. Dealers will trade, sell and tell stories about their coins, stock and bond certificates, paper money, medals, autographs, ephemera and other collectibles. Archives International Auctions will again hold an auction related to financial memorabilia on Saturday, October 24. The Museum is admission free during the Bourse, so visitors can enjoy the show and the museum’s fascinating exhibits in one visit. We expect a wider and more diverse audience.
The Wall Street Bourse has gone through a number of incarnations. It was first produced by John and Diana Herzog in 2011 as a follow-up to the Strasburg Stock and Bond Event, which, after many wonderful years at the Historic Strasburg Inn in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, ended in 2004. The new show at the Museum of American Finance was called “The Wall Street Collectors Bourse.”
Alas, many of the public and press seemed baffled by the word “Bourse.” During the next three years, the show’s title changed several times, though the Bourse Team continued calling it “the Bourse.” This year, for our enhanced show, we are delighted to tell you about the 5th Wall Street Collectors Bourse!
The word “bourse” dates back to 1597 Middle French and derives its meaning from the Latin word bursa meaning “purse.” In Paris during the Middle Ages, money changers set up a market on a bridge over the Seine. To this day, bourse d’etude remains the French phrase for “scholarship” and tenir les cordons de la bourse means “to hold the purse strings.”
Another source puts “bourse” in the 13th Century when an individual named Van der Burse started a gathering of commodity traders at his home in Bruges, Belgium, and such gatherings became institutionalized into “Bruges Bourse.” This concept rapidly gained popularity and spread, with the opening of “bourses” in Ghent and Amsterdam.
Bourses were scattered throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, but it was not until the Amsterdam Bourse was established in 1602 by the Dutch East India Company that the first incarnation of what we could today recognize as a stock market was born because of its size and complexity. The Amsterdam Bourse is the oldest “modern” securities market in the world.
“Bourse” is currently defined by Merriam-Webster as an “exchange, specifically a European stock exchange” or “a sale of numismatic or philatelic items on tables (as at a convention)”.
Now that we have explained the “Bourse” mystery, we hope you will come to our 5th Wall Street Collectors Bourse in October. It will offer all the excitement and history of its Europeans predecessors. And it will be our 5th Bourse…of course!
Show hours:
Thursday, October 22: 12:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Friday, October 23: 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Saturday, October 24: 10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. (Auction @ 10:30am)
For show info, please visit www.wallstreetbourse.com or call (203) 292-6819.
For more information on the auction, email Archives International Auctions at [email protected] or call (201) 944-4800.
