Treasures From the Bruce Morelan Collection: Regency Auction 41

The Bruce Morelan Collection by Joshua McMorrow-Hernandez for PCGS ……
 

These coins are like family

Those are the words of Laura Sperber, founder of Legend Rare Coin Auctions.

She’s handled more than $1 billion in rare coins over her four-decades as a coin dealer, but “these” coins she helped procure for longtime collector Bruce Morelan. They represent the pinnacle of her career and helped secure Morelan, a numismatist not yet even in his 60s, an indelible place among the hobby’s greatest collectors.

Now, The Bruce Morelan Collection is set for sale, to be offered by Sperber’s boutique auction house on October 8 at the Regency Auction 41. The landmark sale, to be held at The Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nevada, will include an extensive selection of outstanding rare coins from Morelan’s wide-ranging collection.

It’s a cabinet that Sperber has personally helped Morelan build over the course of decades.

“On one hand, my heart is heavy. Each [coin] was so carefully studied,” she says. “When we knew it was right for the set, we pounced,” she adds, recalling countless occasions when she and Morelan mutually agreed to bypass bidding on certain coins because they just weren’t the right fit for Morelan’s superior collection.

“However, now that Bruce has decided it’s time to see these coin moved to new homes, I am happy to be able to see them through the process in one of our Regency Auctions, which were created specifically as a home for high-end coins like these.”

Among the Bruce Morelan rarities to be paraded on the auction floor in Vegas are the finest-known 1794 Flowing Hair Dollar and 1804 Draped Bust Dollar – two A-list numismatic superstars that, when they have hammered in past sales, made headlines on the evening network news and across myriad internet-based media outlets. Both coins belong to the magnificent Bruce Morelan Collection of Early Silver Dollars, a multi-million-dollar set of United States dollar coins dated 1794 through 1804 and representing the earliest period of the nation’s silver dollar production.

The 1794 Flowing Hair Dollar to be auctioned in October is graded SP66 by PCGS and is a Specimen-finish coin that many numismatic experts agree is most likely the very first individual silver dollar ever struck by the United States Mint. Its provenance traces through the historic cabinets of Virgil Brand, Art and Paul Kagin, Will W. Neil, and the Cardinal Collection. Bruce Morelan bought it in 2013 for a world-record price of $10,016,875 (including the 17.5% buyer’s premium).

The original article and others like it can be found at https://coinweek.com online