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LOOSE CHANGE: SEPTEMBER 15, 2024Here are some additional items in the media this week that may be of interest. -Editor There have been many articles in the popular media about the sale of the Bruun collection. It's another great story of a quite large and valuable collection that had been off the market and largely unknown until coming to light decades later - in this case, a full century. Howard Berlin sent this one. Thanks. -Editor 
Part of a Danish coin collection belonging to butter magnate Lars Emil Bruun, went under the hammer in Copenhagen, initially collecting €14.8 million on Saturday. The 20,000-piece collection had been kept off the market for a century as a stipulation of Bruun's will, forged soon after the destruction of the first World War. The collection includes rare coins and medals from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and England dating back to the Viking age and is expected to be the most valuable non-US coin collection ever sold. An eight-hour auction in the Danish capital saw the 286 coins on sale for the day bring in €14,820,900 (about $16.4 million), news agency Ritzau reported. Auctioneer Stack's Bowers published data on the individual sold lots, showing one 15th century gold coin known as a "Hans Noble" fetching €1.2 million, well past the predicted sum of between €300,000 and €600,000. The auctioneers said there were only two confirmed coins of this type in museums, and no others in private hands prior to Saturday's sale. For the "werd nerds" among us, in the above excerpt I fixed one typo found in the original article. Can you spot it? -Editor
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Another topic in the popular press is the perennial discussion of the U.S. one cent coin or "penny." This Axios piece highlights the private equity piece of the puzzle discussed in the recent New York Times article. -Editor 
Private equity controls both sides of ... well, the coin. Artazn: This is the maker of zinc "blanks" that the U.S. Mint stamps into pennies, and has been for over four decades. It has been owned by One Rock Capital Partners since 2019, via a carveout of the "process solutions business" of Newell Brands. One Rock renamed Artazn's parent company as Jadex. Coinstar: This is the kiosk company that's become a linchpin to America's currency logistics. One source tells me that Coinstar last year recycled 14.6 billion pennies — around 4x what the U.S. Mint produced — with those coins then packaged and shipped to banks.
To read the complete article, see:
To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
Aaron Oppenheim passed along this story of a small find of Byzantine gold coins. Thanks. -Editor Archaeologists discovered ancient gold coins in an unexpected location during a recent excavation in Bulgaria. The five Byzantine coins, which date back to the reign of Justinian the Great, were uncovered by archaeologists digging at a site in the northern Bulgarian village of Debnevo. The excavation was announced by Dr. Stiliyan Ivanov, an associate professor at the National Institute of Archaeology and Museum, on Aug. 27. The village, which is close to a fifth-century fortress, has been the site of excavation projects for the past five years. But researchers were stumped when they found the coins in the remains of a 10th-century house.
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Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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