Polish Securities Polski Papiery Wartoschiowe

SECURITIES have been a feature of economic acti-vity for nearly 300 years, and antique stock andbond certificates document a society's economic hi-story. The history of trading stocks and bonds inPoland dates back 200 years. At the end of the1960s, collecting antique securities certificates be-came widespread, mostly by journalists who reco-gnized their values. From the archives of securitiesfirms and from the drawers of people's houses oldshares, bonds, bills and checks were taken out. Overtime, their collection has become an elitist hobby.The book-entry system of securities trading , a re-quirement of modern civilization, has been respon-sible for the replacement of paper certificates withdata entered in computer systems. This has inspi-red the authors to preserve the memory of the con-tents and the form of securities certificates issued inPoland.The authors of "Polish Securities" believethat this book represents the most characteristicand beautiful reproductions of Polish securities.Cover: Share of Limited Partnership of ChemicalFerti-lizers Plant issued on December S, 1859. LESEAW ANDRZEJ PAGA Chairman of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Poland, Chairmanof the Polish Securities Commission in the years 1991-1994. He has been in publicservice since 1989, first as an advisor to the Minister of Finance and later as adepartament director in the Ministry of Privatization. After graduating from MariaSkłodowska-Curie University in Lublin, he worked as a scientist at the MariaSkłodowska-Curie University, the Catholic University in Lublin and theCatholic University of America in Washington D.C. Between 1980-1981.Mr. Paga was associated with the Central-Eastern Regional Office of"Solidarity", where he headed the Center of Social Research. Mr. Pagaspecializes in capital markets and in macroeconomics and he received aPh.D. in macroeconomics in 1983. A member of several internationalorganizations and associations, including the U.S .- Poland ActionCommission and director of the Polish-American Enterprise Fund.LESZEK KAŁKOWSKI lives in Kraków, where he runs a division of the Institute ofthe Housing Economy and heads the Chair of the Real Estate Economics and Invest-ments of the School of Economics in Krakow. A graduate of the Jagiellonian Universityand the School of Economics in Kraków, he became a professor of economics in 1974.His hobby is collecting Polish and foreign securities. He continues a family traditionstarted by his father, Tadeusz Kałkowski, who was a well-known coin collectorand author of "Polish Coins Across a Thousand Years". He first started to collectpaper money printed in Poland and its neighboring countries and later switchedto collecting stocks and bonds. His collections were exhibited in Kraków, Płockand Warsaw. He also teaches the history and functioning of securities at severalhigher schools and business courses. A member of the Scientific Council of theBoard of the Polish Economic Society, Mr. Kałkowski is an expert for the PolishNumismatic Society with extensive contacts among collectors in different countries.