The greatest
collections ever
assembled

The man who finished the set

Every collector knows the feeling of a missing hole in an album. Louis E. Eliasberg Sr., a Baltimore banker, is the only person known to have filled every one of them. By 1950, Eliasberg had done what was long considered impossible: he assembled a complete collection of United States coins, every date, every mint mark, every denomination then known. Newspapers of the day called him the "King of Coins."

When the collection was finally sold at auction, in landmark sales held in 1982 and again in 1996 and 1997, it produced some of the most storied results in numismatic history, including the celebrated 1913 Liberty Head nickel and an 1873-CC dime believed unique. No complete United States collection has been assembled since, and many believe none ever will be.

The king who collected everything

King Farouk of Egypt collected on a scale that only a monarch could: automobiles, jewels, stamps, and above all, coins, acquired by the crate through agents across Europe and America during the 1930s and 1940s. After Farouk was deposed in 1952, the new Egyptian government auctioned his possessions in the famous 1954 "Palace Collections of Egypt" sale at Cairo's Koubbeh Palace, scattering one of the largest coin hoards ever assembled by a single person.

One coin in Farouk's cabinet would go on to become the most famous coin in the world.

The coin that was never supposed to exist

In 1933, the United States struck hundreds of thousands of $20 gold Double Eagles, then, as the nation left the gold standard, ordered virtually all of them melted before release. Officially, none were ever issued. Unofficially, a handful escaped the Philadelphia Mint, and one of them made its way, with a legally issued export license, into King Farouk's collection in 1944.

The coin vanished after the Cairo sale and resurfaced decades later, leading to a Secret Service operation in New York in 1996 and years of litigation. In a unique settlement, the government agreed to monetize that single specimen, making it the only 1933 Double Eagle a private citizen may lawfully own. It sold at auction in 2002 for a then-record $7.59 million, and when it returned to the block at Sotheby's in 2021, it brought approximately $18.9 million, the highest price ever paid for a coin at auction.

The family that waited a century

T. Harrison Garrett, of the Baltimore railroad dynasty, began collecting in the 1860s and built one of the finest cabinets of the nineteenth century. His sons continued the work, and the collection was eventually bequeathed to Johns Hopkins University. When it crossed the auction block between 1979 and 1981, the Garrett Collection realized roughly $25 million, a staggering sum for its era, and included immortal rarities such as a 1787 Brasher Doubloon, the celebrated gold piece struck by George Washington's neighbor, goldsmith Ephraim Brasher. In 2021, another Brasher Doubloon sold for approximately $9.36 million, a reminder of how the earliest American gold still commands the world's attention.

The quiet titans

Not every legend wore a crown. Eric P. Newman, a St. Louis collector and scholar, acquired much of his collection in the 1930s and 40s, studied it for seventy years, and published research that reshaped the field; when his holdings were sold between 2013 and 2018, they realized tens of millions of dollars, with proceeds directed to numismatic education. Harry W. Bass Jr. built the definitive study collection of early U.S. gold. And the D. Brent Pogue family collection of early American masterpieces, sold across a series of auctions beginning in 2015, realized more than $100 million in total, among the most valuable coin collections ever brought to market.

Different eras, different fortunes, one common thread: every one of these collections began with a single coin, chosen with care.