Columbia Pictures Corporation stock certificate 1962

Great motion picture piece with the perfect vignette of the Columbia logo of a woman holding a bright torch and the company name. Issued and cancelled. Dated 1962.  Small ink stain in the lower left border that would mostly mat out when framed.

Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. (CPII) is an American film production and distribution studio of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film studios in the world, a member of the so-called Big Six. It was one of the so-called Little Three among the eight major film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age.

The studio, originally founded in 1918 as "Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales" by brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and Jack's best friend Joe Brandt, released its first feature film in August 1922. It adopted the Columbia Pictures name in 1924 and went public two years later. The name is derived from "Columbia", a national personification of the United States, which is used as the studio's logo. In its early years a minor player in Hollywood, Columbia began to grow in the late 1920s, spurred by a successful association with director Frank Capra. It's the world's fifth largest major film studio.

With Capra and others, Columbia became one of the primary homes of the screwball comedy. In the 1930s, Columbia's major contract stars were Jean Arthur and Cary Grant (who was shared with RKO Pictures). In the 1940s, Rita Hayworth became the studio's premier star and propelled their fortunes into the late 1950s. Rosalind Russell, Glenn Ford, and William Holden also became major stars at the studio.

In 1982, the studio was purchased by Coca-Cola; that same year it launched TriStar Pictures as a joint venture with HBO and CBS. Five years later, Coca-Cola spun off Columbia, which was sold to Tri-Star as the latter became Columbia Pictures Entertainment. After a brief period of independence with Coca-Cola maintaining a financial interest, the combined studio was acquired by Japanese company Sony in 1989.

The Columbia Pictures logo, a woman carrying a torch and draped in the American flag (representing Columbia, a personification of the United States), has gone through five major revisions. In 1924, Columbia Pictures used a logo featuring a female Roman soldier holding a shield in her left hand and a stick of wheat in her right hand. The logo changed in 1928 with the figure wearing a draped flag and torch. The woman wore the stola and carried the palla of ancient Rome, and above her were the words "A Columbia Production" ("A Columbia Picture" or "Columbia Pictures Corporation") written in an arch. The illustration was based upon the actress, Evelyn Venable, known for providing the voice of The Blue Fairy in Walt Disney's Pinocchio.

In 1936, the logo was changed: the woman now stood on a pedestal, wore no headdress, and the text "Columbia" appeared in chiseled letters behind her. There were several variations to the logo over the years—significantly, a color version was done in 1943 for The Desperadoes, and the flag became just a drape with no markings – but it remained substantially the same for 40 years. 1976's Taxi Driver was one of the last films to use the figure in her classic appearance.