HELSINGOR – The descendants of Danish butter magnate Lars Emil Bruun waited exactly 100 years to claim their now US$72 million (S$98.1 million) inheritance. Not by choice.

At least one grandchild reportedly tried and failed to break Mr Bruun’s will, which specified that his 20,000-piece coin collection should remain intact and stored away, then be sold at auction after a century elapsed.

Now, finally, the time has come. The trove of coins and medals will be sold over several years via coin auction house and dealer Stack’s Bowers. The first tranche of the collection is set to hit the block this fall.

“When I first heard about the collection a couple of years back, I was flabbergasted that something like this could exist,” said Mr Vicken Yegparian, the company’s vice-president for numismatics.

Safekeeping cultural patrimony

Over the course of his life, Mr Bruun (1852 to 1923) created a monumental collection of coins, medals and paper currency, predominantly from countries with some connection to Scandinavia.

“You’ve got Denmark, Norway, Sweden and then places that used to be under Danish or Norwegian or Swedish rule,” said Mr Yegparian, name-checking places as varied as the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) and Tranquebar (now Tharangambadi), a one-time Danish outpost in India.

Mr Bruun even collected English coins from when the Danes ruled the country. “There’s a huge run of coins from King Canute of England,” Mr Yegparian said.

Once Mr Bruun had accumulated all these objects, though, he began to weigh their national significance.

Having lived through the devastation of World War I, Mr Bruun was understandably skittish about Denmark’s cultural patrimony. As a consequence, he decided to frame his collection as a sort of backup to the Royal Danish Collection of Coins and Medals, “as a redundancy and a protection against something happening to the existing collection”, said Mr Brian Kendrella, president of Stack’s Bowers. Mr Bruun decided that after 100 years, if the national collection had remained intact, it would be safe to sell his own collection at public auction. Proceeds were willed to his direct heirs.

And so for the past 100 years, his collection has sat, mostly undisturbed, available to scholars when they have asked and locked away to everyone else, Mr Kendrella said.

Living with a gold mine

Through the auction house, his heirs declined to comment. The Danish media has been interested in this story for years, however, and from time to time, Mr Bruun’s descendants have commented publicly on the looming inheritance, with one noting that his father was a taxi driver and that he might “buy a new golf set” if and when the collection was sold.

The irony, Mr Yegparian said, is that by stashing away his collection for 100 years, Mr Bruun managed to successfully safeguard his family’s intergenerational wealth.

“I read somewhere that in the late teens or early 1920s, Mr Bruun was worth the equivalent of US$200 million in today’s dollars,” he said. “In that time period, the collection has taken an outsized value to what it might’ve been in 1923.”

Therefore, today’s beneficiaries “aren’t wealthy as a result of inheritance or anything like that”, said Mr Kendrella, who negotiated with a small group of the heirs (the total number has not been publicly disclosed) to win the consignment of the collection.

“I have not specifically talked to them about what it has been like to have this in the family for the past hundred years and how that has impacted them.”

But, he added that after earlier unsuccessful attempts to break the will, the heirs have been “kind of just patient – ‘It will be what it will be’ – and they’ve really been delightful to work with”.

Selling it all

Stack’s Bowers is still cataloguing the collection, which was last inventoried after Mr Bruun’s death. But the company can safely say the collection consists of roughly 20,000 objects, Mr Kendrella said.

There are about 15,000 coins, 4,600 medals and tokens, 330 banknotes, and then about 1,800 book titles, many of which are multi-volume.

The valuation, Mr Kendrella said, is based on the US$72 million that the collection is insured for. Although insurance values can often be inflated, “in this case, everything that we’ve done so far supports that amount as a pretty reasonable valuation”, he said.

Given the collection’s volume, in conjunction with its targeted subject matter, the auction house is still working out how to formulate its sales and to whom it should market the pieces. Multiple records have been set in the coin collecting market recently: In 2021, Sotheby’s broke records, selling a gold coin for US$18.9 million; earlier in April, Stack’s Bowers sold a Comitia Americana medal for US$900,000, setting a world record for a bronze medal sold at auction, according to the auction house.

In the coin market, said Mr Kendrella, “we didn’t see the kind of crazy increases that you saw in things like sports cards and maybe some of the other areas” during Covid-19 and post-pandemic. “I think we saw a much more sustained, steady and healthy growth.”

As a result, he said, “prices that we’re seeing haven’t experienced the drop-off over the past 12 or 18 months you’ve seen in other categories”.

There are several obvious markets for the Bruun collection, Mr Yegparian said.

“I think the no-brainer is domestic Scandinavian demand,” he said. “But I think there are these bigger rarities that are going to be contested internationally.” 

Like most collectables markets, the coin market is bifurcated, he said, with the top of the market experiencing intense demand and everything else lagging behind.

“There’s going to be demand from American, European and Asian collectors who might not have collected Scandinavian coinage in a meaningful way, but are going to be mesmerised by the story, the rarity and the value of these things and pursue them accordingly,” Mr Yegparian said. BLOOMBERG