Get ready to bid on major gold $20 collection

One of the all-time finest collections of Saint-Gaudens double eagle gold coins listed in the Professional Coin Grading Service Set Registry®, the A&A Saints Collection, will be auctioned on eBay starting at 6 p.m. Pacific time March 29 through April 8.

The set includes the finest-known 1932, graded PCGS Gold Shield MS66+ and formerly in the collections of Dr. Steven Duckor and David Akers.

The anonymous seller will donate a portion of the proceeds to combat counterfeits in the marketplace.

Barry Stuppler, president of Woodland Hills, California-based Mint State Gold by Stuppler, is representing the seller.

“Twenty-one of the collection’s 52 coins are either the finest known or tied for the finest known,” Stuppler said.

“This is the largest set of its kind ever offered on eBay,” he said.

Stuppler estimates its value to be more than $7 million.

The entire collection can be viewed at www.SaintSet.com.

No matter how you slice it, this will be a milestone sale.

Coins of such rarity, quality and value are watched closely by the entire professional numismatic field.

High-end collectors will watch this sale closely for another reason.

Will the results achieved by eBay equal those that can be achieved by the major U.S. numismatic auction firms?

Will the bottom line, the financial result to the collector, equal or exceed that which can be reasonably expected from consignment to a major auction firm?

I will certainly be looking to see how this goes.

I know the huge resources that the major firms can bring to the service of sellers of major collections.

These major numismatic firms have hundreds of thousands of hobbyists on their contact lists.

They have public relations staff.

They also have keen numismatic insight based on long experience and business relationships.

Their lists of clients might be hundreds of thousands long, but they also know how to reach out to the key bidders.

For top Saint-Gaudens gold pieces, they know the half dozen or dozen people who can be expected to be likely buyers of the high-end coins.

Success for this eBay sale means we will likely see more top collections sold on the Internet website.

It is a nice touch that three percent of the sale proceeds will go to nonprofit organizations including the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, The ALS Association, and the Anti-Counterfeiting Education Foundation.

This is generous.

This will make all collectors proud.

I hope a great deal of money goes to these worthy causes.

However, charitable donations are not the primary motivator of a coin buyer, as everyone who has ever purchased a U.S. commemorative coin from the Mint knows.

Good luck to all.

Buyers get ready.

For the rest of us, let’s be ready to watch March 29 as this auction begins to unfold.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper won the Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog for the third time in 2017 . He is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."

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