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A Canceled Methane Bond

A municipal methane bond issued in 1934 to expand the Municipal Fart Grid and canceled in 1946, catalogued with its uncut coupons and its cancellation.

An engraved municipal bond on a cream museum mount, the word CANCELED punched across its face, a sheet of numbered interest coupons attached along one edge.

Accession no. NMDP 1946.137

Object: municipal bearer bond, engraved, with attached coupon sheet, perforated CANCELED. Credit line: Collection of the National Museum of the Digestive Past.

Provenance

The bond was issued in 1934 to finance the second-phase expansion of the Municipal Fart Grid and canceled in 1946, its cancellation being the event by which the collection dates it. It was surrendered at the treasury window, perforated through the engraving, and set aside rather than destroyed, by a clerk whose reasons are not recorded. It reached the Museum eighty leaves into a bound book of its retired fellows, the only one removed.

A detail of a bond's attached interest coupons, several clipped off at one end and the remainder intact, each faintly stamped.
Fig. 1 —The coupon sheet. Nine were clipped before cancellation; thirty-one never will be.

Condition report

The engraving is crisp beneath the cancellation, which reads CANCELED in a punched hand across the face and again, smaller, across each coupon. Of forty semiannual coupons, thirty-one remain attached and uncut; the nine that were clipped were clipped before cancellation, so the bond records both that it paid and that it stopped. The paper is bank-grade and has toned evenly.

Curatorial note

A canceled instrument is worth its face value in nothing and its subject in full. The Museum collects the second, and files this bond as a complete account of a promise the grid made, kept for a while, and was released from.