I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that underscores the dream of stumbling upon a rare or valuable item while going about their everyday business, or in the case of collectors, finding something rare that has been overlooked or misidentified. A recurring dream I have is stumbling across a hidden room in an old house that is filled with old “stuff”.
Philatelists (stamp collectors), Numismatists (coin and currency collectors), card collectors, comic collectors and the like check out shops and troll the internet in search of items for their collections, hopefully something that the current owner doesn’t know the value of. But occasionally non-collectors find items that turn out to be real treasures. Cases in point:
In 1885, a Swedish boy named Georg Wilhelm Baeckman discovered the “Treskilling Yellow” postage stamp in his grandmothers’ attic. Issued in Sweden in 1855, it was printed in yellow by mistake instead of the intended green. It is considered one of the rarest and most expensive stamps in philatelic history.
In 2002, Joan Langbord, the daughter of deceased jeweler Israel Switt, had his safe deposit box drilled and found ten 1933 $20 gold pieces, which, after they had been struck, all specimens, under order of President Franklin Roosevelt, were ordered destroyed. One 1933 coin was known to have survived, and after lengthy negotiation with the government was auctioned for over $7 million, with the government and the owner splitting the proceeds. In this case, Ms. Langbord was not as fortunate because the government seized her coins as their property and after back-and-forth court decisions finally prevailed, with Langbord receiving nothing.
In 2012, Karl Kissner and his cousin Karia Hench were cleaning out their grandfather’s house and came across a box of baseball cards that, upon research and enlisting help from a dealer, were determined to be a rare group known as the E98 series, printed in 1910. They were in pristine condition and were worth around $3 million.
In 2013, David Gonzalez was renovating a fixer-up home he had bought in Elbow Lake, Minn., and found stuffed in the wall as insulation a copy of the 1938 Action Comics, issue No. 1, which is the debut edition of Superman. It sold for $175,000.
Closer to home, an Atlantic County man took what he hoped was a genuine Honus Wagne card known as the T206 (the rarest of all T206 cards) to the Atlantic City Antique Show held at the new convention center where he showed it an auction company. After a lot of head scratching and consulting with other knowledgeable dealers, the card was declared real. Although it was in terrible shape, it still sold for around $60,000.
Yes, these are stories about finds that don’t happen every day, but my advice is to keep your eyes open and have anything that looks unusual checked before discarding. I tell people I’m willing to look over anything, but if it gets thrown out first, I can’t help.
Douglas Keefe and his wife Linda are owners of Beachcomber Coins and Collectibles in Egg Harbor Township.
