Schwinn Trademark Registration Notice — Virgin Islands, 1949

733

GOVERNMENT OF
THE VIRGIN ISLANDS OF THE UNITED STATES

Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas

CERTIFICATE OF REGISTRATION

TO ALL WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME, GREETING:

THIS IS TO CERTIFY that these has been registered in the Office of the Government Secretary of the Virgin Islands of the United States in accordance with the provisions of the Regulations governing the registration of Patents and Trademarks in the Virgin Islands, approved April 1, 1946, the following TRADEMARK:

SCHWINN

bearing United States Patent Office trademark registration No. 423,626, dated March 25, 1947, and now owned by Arnold Schwinn and Company, of Chicago, Illinois, corporation, of Illinois, which has made a showing of ownership of the said trademark.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the Government of the Virgin Islands of the United States to be affixed at Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, this 28th day of December, 1948.

MORRIS F. DE CASTRO
Government Secretary for the Virgin Islands

[The notice is set as a single newspaper column with its serial number, 733, standing alone at the upper right. The heads are centered in spaced capitals with rules between them, the body set justified. The trademark itself is reproduced as a block in the middle of the column: the word SCHWINN in a heavy brush script, the letters rising and falling along an arch so that the S and the final N sit lowest and the double W rides at the top, with the stroke of the S sweeping back beneath the word. The testimonium is indented and the Government Secretary’s name and title are centered at the foot.]

[One legal notice cropped out of page 4 of the St. Croix Avis of Christiansted for Friday 1 April 1949. It is not advertising and it is not held as advertising. It is a territorial government’s certificate of trademark registration, and it is here for one reason: it reproduces the Schwinn wordmark as a legally attested object, with a number and a date attached to it.

The mark shown is the arched brush script. The notice ties it to United States Patent Office trademark registration No. 423,626 of 25 March 1947, and names the owner as Arnold Schwinn and Company of Chicago. That is a harder fact about the wordmark than any advertisement can give, because an advertisement shows a mark while a registration certifies which mark, owned by whom, from when.

Three dates sit on the sheet and they are not the same. The United States registration is 25 March 1947. The Virgin Islands certificate was executed at Charlotte Amalie on 28 December 1948. This impression was published on 1 April 1949. The document is dated here by its publication, and the other two are recorded above.

The signature is worth noting. Morris F. de Castro signs as Government Secretary for the Virgin Islands; the following year he became the first native Virgin Islander appointed Governor of the territory.

The company is at this moment doing something ordinary and revealing: registering its name in a small United States territory in the Caribbean under regulations approved in 1946. It appears in the column between two other registrations of the same kind, certificate 729 for Paul Muller of Basle, assignor to J. R. Geigy A. G., and certificate 732 for Joseph Mures, assignor to the Gillette Safety Razor Company of Boston. A bicycle maker’s name is being protected in the same routine paragraphs as a Swiss chemical patent and a razor.

The notice ran at least six times in this paper between 1 April and 23 May 1949 and this record cites the earliest impression held. The other five are 9 April, 29 April, 13 May, 17 May and 23 May.

The certificate sets THIS IS TO CERTIFY that these has been registered, and it is transcribed uncorrected.

The whole newspaper page is never the document here. The notice was cropped from the Library of Congress IIIF master at native resolution and the page identifier is kept in the provenance pair. The body text was set from the Library of Congress machine text and then read against the image at native resolution, which is why this record is marked as machine text checked by eye rather than as transcription.]