THE BRUUN COLLECTION GETS COVERAGE

As announced in March, Stack's Bowers Galleries has been selected to auction "the extraordinary coin, medal, banknote, and book collection of Danish industrialist Lars Emil Bruun (1852-1923)." The popular press got wind of the sale this week and a number of articles have appeared about it. Here's an excerpt from a Washington Post piece. -Editor

For more than 100 years, one of the most valuable private collections of coins in the world has been kept out of the public eye. It's been stowed away in a secret location that almost no one knows — and before that, behind the walls of a castle and in the basement of a bank.

This fall, it will go on sale — and is expected to fetch up to $72 million. It is the most valuable world coin collection to ever come to market, according to Stack's Bowers, the American rare coin dealer and auction house handling the sale.

The collection of nearly 20,000 coins, medals, bank notes and books was assembled over the course of decades by Danish businessman and butter magnate Lars Emil Bruun.

Bruun, who died in 1923, stipulated in his will that his collection should not be sold for a century after his death. After experiencing the ravages of World War I, Bruun declared it should be kept in reserve to replace the Danish national collection should it ever be destroyed in a war or through other misfortune, such as a fire.

Since the Danish Royal Collection of Coins and Medals is still intact, Bruun's collection will now be sold with the proceeds benefiting his heirs.

The upcoming sale has attracted outsize attention, in part because of the air of mystery attached to it, said Helle Horsnæs, a senior researcher at Denmark's National Museum.

But it's also because of the unique nature of the collection, which captures centuries of Scandinavian history, including a time when Denmark and Norway were united under one same kingdom from the 16th to the early 19th century, Horsnæs said.

Bruun's grandson was involved in an effort to negotiate a direct sale of the collection to the National Museum of Denmark, he said. But Danish authorities prevented the sale, saying it went against Bruun's will, according to Johnsen. Authorities only authorized the sale of a small number of coins, Johnsen said, to help cover insurance costs.

Once the 100-year mark passed, the National Museum still had first rights to purchase certain pieces from the collection — and it selected seven rare coins, said Horsnæs, who was involved in the sale this year.

Stack's Bowers said the sale of the collection will start in the fall and will likely take three to five years to complete. The expected value of the sale is based on the insurance valuation of the collection, which stands at about 500 million Danish kroner ($72 million), according to the auction house.

Thanks also to Kavan Ratnatunga for passing along the story.

While finalizing this article I came across a January 2000 note from Alan Luedeking quoting a lot description in George Kolbe's sale 79 noting that the "…Lars Emil Bruun collection of Swedish coins [whose] first component, featuring medieval coins, was sold in May 1914, but the eruption of World War I prevented the second part of the sale, scheduled for October 26 & 27, 1914, from taking place."

The press release on the sale of the collection didn't address the earlier sale, but this history fits the narrative that the devastation of WWI led Bruun to change plans for the disposition of his collection.

So a selection of medieval Swedish coins had been sold off earlier, and another group of seven pieces has been sold to the National Museum of Denmark. The group is described in a recent CoinsWeekly article, linked below.

Where did coins from the 1914 sale end up? It would be an interesting exercise to reconstruct an inventory of the original full collection (or does one already exist?)

I assume the mentioned book collection is a library of numismatic literature; we'll look forward to the future sale announcements. -Editor