Outstanding Coin Dealers & Auction Houses
The Hans Schulman ... Legacy
Hans M.F. Schulman was an American Numismatic icon, but a tempestuous one at that. Most people either loved or highly disliked him. Some catered to him, while others avoided him like a plague, but history will look back on him as one of our great 20th Century catalogers and coin dealers who changed the face of numismatics and how coins would be sold in the future.
The Schulman name was and still is a famous numismatic name even without Hans, for many years the Schulman family has bought and sold coins all over Europe from their headquarters located in the Netherlands. But the Americanized Schulman would set the U.S. coin market on its collective ear shortly after his arrival here.
His coin sales started very quickly after arriving in New York City because of his famous father and uncle back in Europe. He was taken under the wings of some of the great New York dealers of the time with Abe Kosoff being his primary sponsor in the early days. By March 1940 he was already producing a limited number of auctions under his own name, if not in truth by himself. From 1940 until January 1942 Hans had a total of five auctions, but he shortly discovered a better way for him to sell coins.
Evidently between his family and their friends in the U.S.A., Hans had access to almost unlimited funds for that day and time and in all probability the coin stock from the family’s business in Holland before the Nazis took over the country. This enabled him to buy and sell large foreign coin collections unavailable from any other sources.
He became the darling of the largest coin collector of that time, King Farouk of Egypt and Hans spent the vast majority of his time from 1942 until the early 1950s working many hours each month for Farouk and a few other well-heeled U.S. collectors. Hans didn’t produce any more auctions until February 1950 when he sold a large group of King Farouk’s duplicates here in the U.S. in his sixth sale.
The following year, Hans was selected to sell the first part of the Howard D. Gibbs collections, Gibbs consignments would become a mainstay for Schulman well into the 1970s. It was in this auction that Schulman would have his first good group of Latin and Mexican coins that would become rather standard in his later years.
One area of coin sales that are overlooked by many that study Schulman are his Fixed Price Lists that began shortly after his arrival here. I’m still in the early stages of my research on his Fixed Price Lists, but it now appears he issued over 100 and all of them I’ve seen so far had Mexican coins in them. By the way, if any of our readers have some I would love to borrow them to add to my database?
From all indications Hans loved handling gold coins, especially from all over the world, but he soon became famous for handling some of Latin America’s rarest pieces and it has been reported that he kept an index card file on all of his and other dealers sales of these coins. Somewhere long ago, before I kept real good records, I remember reading that he was donating his card files to either the ANA or ANS, but to date I still have not been able to confirm this happened? Does anyone out there know what happened to these files? If so, please contact us.
One of the first blockbuster Latin collections Hans sold occurred in his March 28th 1960 sale when he sold the Acosta y Lara collection of Latin silver. 1966 was a banner year for Mexican collectors with several Schulman and two Kreisberg & Schulman sales that contained many Mexican rarities. Every one of the 12 combined Kreisberg & Schulman sales from 1957 to 1967 are worth securing by Mexican collectors as each contains some good material.
Schulman’s most controversial auction occurred in 1970, when Mel Fisher consigned several coins to one of his auctions. At the urging of Clyde Hubbard and Virgil Hancock that the coins were Fakes, Schulman withdrew the coins from the sale. Schulman didn't need any more bad publicity at the time, because even today rumors and stories abound that several of the rarest coins in some Schulman sales were out and out fakes, while others say many were contemporary counterfeits and Hans knew it, but never noted it in his catalogs. Who is right and who is wrong? I’ve seen several of these coins, but I’m no Colonial expert, so I choose to make no judgment, one way or another. Be sure to see this issue of Mexican Coin Magic Photo Album for photos and a short story on these coins.
But today I can, for sure, state there are many extremely rare Mexican Republican gold coins that Schulman bought and sold that have never seen the light of day again. Many of the nicest and rarest Mexican coins in the John Jay Pittman collection can be traced back to Schulman, but others are lost in the fog of time and history.
Another of Schulman’s claims to fame was the large number of coins he secured during the King Farouk Palace sale held by Sotheby’s in 1954. With only a handful of Americans at the sale and because the King owed so much money to Schulman it now appears he got some preferential treatment at the sale. Between Schulman and the other four or five Americans who attended the sale, they purchased almost all of the Mexican gold in the Farouk collection, and Hans got more than his share of them.
One of Schulman’s greatest consigners of Mexican material over the years appeared to be Howard Gibbs, and during the March 1966 Gibbs sale over 500 lots of Mexican coins were offered, but no Republican gold. Many of the Schulman catalogs are rare to very rare, I have been trying to build a complete set of them for a number of years, and I still lack a good number of them including one of the Kreisberg & Schulman catalogs. If anyone out there has a complete set, I wish you would contact me, if you would loan a couple of them, just to see if there is any Mexican material in them?
In summary, Hans M.F. Schulman may not have handled the largest quantity of Mexican coins during his 30+ years of selling coins, but he did handle many high-grade coins, some that were great rarities, and some have not come back on the public market that I can find since then. But like so many other phases of Mexican Numismatics, I have more questions than answers about Hans Schulman and the Mexican coins that passed through his hands during his career.
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