“My grandfather’s hero was a man named Louis Eliasberg, a Baltimore financier who is the only person to have assembled a complete collection of United States coins, including all the various dates and mint marks.” — Nicholas Sparks, Dear John, 2006 Luminously lustrous and splendidly toned, this gem exemplifies the quality promised by an Eliasberg-Pogue provenance. Both sides show bold mint frost and extraordinary cartwheel luster, enlivening delicate toning highlights of pale pastel blue, faint champagne gold, and darker amber that are mostly confined to supporting roles near the rims. Most of the surface shows gold-tinted brilliance, giving the central design elements and their fine details a spotlight. While the stars at right almost all lack their centers, with star 9 an exception, other central and peripheral designs are crisp and well defined. The fields are fresh in appearance, with no visible hairlines and few marks of any consequence. A scattering of light marks is seen on Liberty’s portrait and above the eagle, none serious. Magnified scrutiny may reveal a single diagonal hairline from Liberty’s nose to her shoulder and a single dig under the eagle’s wing at right. A couple of light surface specks are present between stars 9 and 10. The dies are unclashed and undamaged. Nine of the half dollars offered in this catalog were formerly the property of Louis Eliasberg. Nearly 20 years have passed since the final segment of Eliasberg’s collection of United States coins was sold; his world gold coins were auctioned in 2005 and some additional miscellany was sold in 2010. With each passing year, gems that bear the Eliasberg provenance become more and more widely dispersed. Some lose their provenance altogether, diminishing the supply of Eliasberg coins until work or serendipity results in a reunion of the coin and its provenance. Despite this, the legend of the Eliasberg Collection continues to grow. In 2006, Louis Eliasberg made an appearance in Dear John by Nicholas Sparks, a novel that topped the New York Times Best Sellers list and was later made into a major Hollywood movie. The Publisher’s Weekly synopsis of the book describes the narrator/protagonist’s father as “a socially backward single postal-worker dad obsessed with coin collecting.” Though much of the novel was inspired by his own experiences, Sparks later said the father’s coin collecting obsession, inherited from the character’s father before him, was “conceived ... to best support the story’s bittersweet ending.” While the Eliasberg provenance needs no marketing to spin it in a more positive light, the hobby of numismatics may benefit from such an effort. This spectacular gem has not been offered at auction since the 1997 Eliasberg sale. Then uncertified, this piece now becomes the finest PCGS-graded specimen of this die variety ever auctioned, surpassing the PCGS MS-66 last sold in February 2003. The only 1830 Small 0 half dollar ever certified finer than this one is the MS-67 (PCGS) Overton-115 sold in the February 2009 Ira and Larry Goldberg sale. This piece was offered as “perhaps finest known” in the Eliasberg sale. As 19 years have now passed without a superior example selling publicly, that conclusion appears more likely than not. PCGS# 39812. NGC ID: 24FU.
