One of the Most Valuable Coin Collections Ever Assembled Is Coming to Market

One of the most valuable coin collections ever assembled is coming to market — and it has a story to match its lofty price tag.

One of the most valuable coin collections ever assembled is coming to market—and it has a story to match its lofty price tag.

For starters, there’s the element of mystery: the inheritor of this 15,000-strong collection that has been insured at more than $100 million has chosen to remain anonymous. What is clear, as offered by the consignee Numismatica Ars Classica, is that in the 1930s, the heir to a European family business became very obsessed with coins.

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The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was the trigger, pushing the young man to seek out alternate avenues for storing wealth. First came gold bullion, then coins. Freed from the day-to-day operations of the family business, the collector spent the 1930s hopscotching across Europe and the Americas with his new wife acquiring coins. The coin firm calls the period “an extended honeymoon” and has labelled the assembly the Traveller Collection.

But for more than half a century, the Traveller Collection went nowhere at all. During World War II, the collector became fearful and decided to enclose his gold and silver coins in cigar boxes and bury them in his garden. When the German forces indeed invade, he died shortly thereafter. Only his wife knew the collection’s location and she chose to keep it a secret until the mid-1990s.

A 70 ducat coin of the Polish king Sigismund III. Photo: courtesy Numismatica Ars Classica.

Now, nearly a century on from the Traveller Collection’s beginning, Numismatica Ars Classica is set to sell off the coins in a series of 15 auctions spanning three years. “[It’s] a landmark in the history of numismatics,” said Arturo Russo, the coin firm’s director. “The catalogues of the Traveller Collection will serve as an important reference for the future collectors and scholars.”

The first sale, on May 20, will focus on 200 of the collection’s British coins and medallions. This spans the first machine-struck coins of Charles II’s reign in the 17th-century through to a set created for the coronation of George VI in 1937. One highlight is the Una and the Lion, a £5 gold coin that was designed by the master coin-maker William Wyon in 1839. Drawing from The Faerie Queene (1590) an epic poem by Edmund Spenser, the reverse depicts a young and fair Queen Victoria walking alongside a lion. It’s estimated to sell for 250,000 CHF ($284,000).

An Athens gold stater, struck in 296 BC by the tyrant Lachares. Photo: courtesy Numismatica Ars Classica.

As the initial listings show, the collector boasted an omnivorous appetite. There’s an Athens gold stater struck in 296 B.C.E by Lachares to pay his troops as the city was being besieged by Demetrius, the king of Macedonia. Greek city states typically used silver for coins and the story goes that Lachares stripped the statue of the goddess Athena to strike the coins—it was in vain: Demetrius took Athens in 294 B.C.E. It’s estimated at 125,000 CHF ($142,000).

The one Ounce Port Phillip Coin from the Traveller Collection. Photo: courtesy Numismatica Ars Classica.

Elsewhere there’s a 70 ducat coin from 1621 of the Polish king Sigismund III Vasa, who imposed Catholicism across his territory and transferred the capital from Kraków to Warsaw. A 100-ducat coin of the king, also minted in 1621, sold for $2.2 million in 2018, a record for a Polish coin. Numismatica Ars Classica is offering an estimate of CHF 450,000 ($511,000). The Australian Port Philip coin, which features a kangaroo and stems from one of the country’s earliest mints, is estimated at 250,000 CHF ($284,000)

One of the rarest offerings is a set of five tomans, an old Persian monetary unit. It was minted at the turn of the 19th-century and only five complete sets are known to exist. It has been estimated at 2 million CHF ($2.3 million).

Ahead of the sale of British coins, David Guest, an expert brought in to consult on the sale, said the Traveller Collection was unrivalled.