This looks like the real deal. At first I thought it is so perfect and new looking that it had to be a 1990s reproduction. The more I look at it, the more it seems genuine.

The pen looks like real pen, the cancellation on the back is real ink, the smudges and stain, such that there are, are genuine, the perforations look real.

I think this is an actual 85-year-old check from a coke bottler, signed by a Mary C Walton, to an advertiser for $31.2 during the Great Depression. I guess somebody was working then!