Shirley and Earl McNall knew they had one hot little entrepreneur on their hands. Son Bruce was only five, and he could wipe everybody out at the Monopoly board, building hotels on all the expensive properties, leaving his mom stewing with an empty lot, say, on low-rent Baltic Avenue. Dazzled, the mother, a lab technician, and the father, a biochemistry professor at the University of Southern California, rationed Bruce's television watching and showered him with intellectual goodies.
The pampering paid off. Bruce became a wealthy coin collector while still in his teens....
Jesse Birnbaum & Patrick E. Cole, "Fall of the Collector," Time (14 November 1994)
*****
He owned the Los Angeles Kings and the Toronto Argonauts.
He financed The Fabulous Baker Boys, Mr. Mom, Weekend at Bernie's and Blame It on Rio.
He owned champion racehorses, Rolls Royces, a private jet, a private helicopter and six homes.
But Bruce McNall's empire was an empire built upon financial fraud.
In 1994 the empire came crashing down. McNall was sent to prison in 1997. He did five years.
Since his release, he has kept a fairly low profile as co-chair of A-Mark Entertainment.
It was buying and selling ancient coins that funded Bruce McNall's rapid rise to prominence...
...At 15, with inventory he had built through his own mail-order business in ancient coins, McNall opened a numismatic shop. At 16, having sold out to enroll at UCLA and study ancient history, he had $60,000, a Jaguar XK-E, one apartment near campus and a grander one a little farther away. At 20, cajoled back into business..., he opened a new coin shop, this time on Rodeo Drive....
At 24, in 1974, McNall bagged the Athena Decadrachm, known to collectors as the Mona Lisa of Greek coins. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who would become president of France, had wanted it. So had Aristotle Onassis. Until McNall bought the Athena Decadrachm, the record price for a coin sold at auction had been $100,000, but, to his way of thinking, that coin had nothing resembling this one's value. He was surrounded by schmoes. He put in a winning bid of $420,000, left everyone reeling in disbelief, and within a week resold the Athena Decadrachm for $470,000....
The ancient coin firm that McNall founded in 1971 would become a legend in its own right. And thereby hangs a tale....
That firm was Numismatic Fine Arts:
The first rare coin firm to operate under this business name had been founded in 1939 by Edward Gans, a German banker who had fled Nazi Germany. (Gans probably is better known today for the extraordinary collection of Sasanian seals that he bequeathed to the University of California at Berkeley).
The business name Numismatic Fine Arts (usually abbreviated, when referring to the McNall incarnation, as NFA) was "purchased" from Gans by famed numismatist Joel Malter, who was McNall's business partner in the earliest days of McNall's coin operations under the NFA name.
McNall did many things wrong in his life, as he himself notes in his autobiography (pictured above left). But most collectors of numismatic literature probably would argue that founding NFA was one of the things that McNall did right. As Kerry Wetterstrom points out in a 1999 article, NFA's almost quarter-century of operations produced an extraordinary series of auction catalogs that today are highly prized by collectors of numismatic literature:
As we have noted in several previous posts (see, e.g., here and here), catalogs can be an incredible resource for the astute collector, whether one collects books, or coins, or both. In many cases catalogs can well serve as bibliographies for a particular subject, and they often are crucial to provenance (chain-of-ownership) research for a wide range of collectibles, books included.
NFA catalogs featured superb production values, with full-page color photos for particularly important properties...
...and cataloging by some of the most knowledgeable numismatists of their generation (Cathy Lorber, David Sear and Simon Bendall were among several NFA catalogers who would go on to even greater post-NFA fame):
Wetterstrom recorded 36 NFA auction catalogs -- the first in 1975, the last in 1994. Your faithful blogger, despite several decades of collecting numismatic literature, has never seen a complete set of these catalogs come up for sale, either by private treaty or auction. (If you know of such sales, we would love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected])
Of course, this does not mean that such sets do not exist. We strongly suspect that a least a few of NFA's competitors still retain complete sets as part of their working libraries.
The ultimate goal for the completist private collector, we imagine, would be to collect not only all the softbound catalogs, but -- more importantly and far more difficult -- all of the hardbound catalogs as well:
As Wetterstrom points out, only 22 of NFA's auctions were published in both a softbound and a hardbound version (the hardbound versions were instituted by early NFA co-owner Joel Malter, to his eternal credit). While the very first such hardbound auction catalog may have been published in as many as 500 copies, most of the later hardbound catalogs had much lower press runs. NFA's two ANA sales, for example, appear to have had a press run of only about 20 hardbound copies. The average press run for all NFA hardbound catalogs appears to have been somewhere around 100 copies each.
Your faithful blogger has never seen a complete set of NFA's hardbound catalogs offered for sale, either, although again this does not mean that such sets do not exist. In fact, even near-complete sets rarely come up for sale. This may be because certain numbers in the hardbound series, as Wetterstrom points out, are particularly scarce: II, III, IV, V, VI, XIV and the Garrett Collection sales (this latter 3-volume set of sales occasionally appears in the marketplace as a stand-alone collectible -- it often is collected by folks who are collecting the many other auction catalogs that were issued for the properties of this legendary family of collectors):
A stimulating collecting challenge, for book collectors so inclined....
(N.B.: In 1999, the remaining assets of Numismatic Fine Arts were acquired by Classical Numismatic Group and Freeman and Sear. All photos in this post are courtesy of the author.)
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