Sotheby's on Friday began displaying a 1933 Double Eagle US$20 gold coin, the only one the US will permit to be privately owned. The auction house said the Double Eagle could fetch as much as US$6 million, a record for a single coin, when it is auctioned July 30.
The record auction price for a coin is just over US$4.1 million, paid in August 1999 for an 1804 US silver dollar also often described as the numismatic equivalent of the famed Leonardo da Vinci portrait.
Sotheby's is auctioning its Double Eagle, which is 90 percent gold and 10 percent copper, with Stack's Rare Coins, another auction house.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The 1933 Double Eagle up for sale followed a long and winding road from its minting to the auction block.
The US$20 gold coin was first minted in 1850. It became known as the "Double Eagle" because the US$10 coin that was already being minted was known as the "Single Eagle," Fore said.
The Mint struck thousands of Double Eagles early in 1933. They never became official coinage because Theodore Roosevelt's cousin, Franklin, by then the president, took the US off the gold standard, to help the Depression-ridden economy.
The Mint melted down most of the 1933 Double Eagles, reserving two for the Smithsonian Institution. But 10 escaped into the black market. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Mint retrieved and destroyed nine of these. Sotheby's believes the 10th coin, the one it says it is auctioning, found its way to the Royal Legation of Egypt.
This governmental entity in 1944 asked the US Treasury Department for a license to export the coin to Egypt's King Farouk, an avid coin collector. Not realizing the coin's significance, the department granted the license.
For 50 years, the coin vanished. But in 1995 British coin dealer Stephen Fenton bought it, and in Feb. 1996 tried to sell it at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to US Secret Service agents posing as coin collectors. The coin was seized. Litigation dragged on until January 2001, when the coin was moved from 7 World Trade Center to Mint depositories. Sotheby's took delivery of the coin on Tuesday.
The Double Eagle being auctioned has suffered slight wear over the years, but is considered in or near "gem brilliant uncirculated" condition, a very high quality, Sotheby's said.
Objects often rise in value when they are produced or released in error.
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