Nearly 30 lots of paper money from the collection of late Canadian numismatist Don Allen, who died in July 2020, are being offered at an auction south of the border later this month.
Allen made a numismatic name for himself beginning in the early 1950s, bringing “a storyteller’s passion to numismatic history and collecting,” his daughter Laura Ashton wrote for CCN after his death (“Harold Don Allen, prolific numismatist across seven decades, dies at 89,” Vol 58 #10).
Some of his sought-after banknotes are now set to cross the block alongside other world paper money on Aug. 16, during one of several sessions hosted by Stack’s Bowers as part of its American Numismatic Association (ANA) Auction.
Allen speaks at the Rutgers Speakers Bureau at New Jersey’s Rutgers University in 1968.
Among the highlights of Allen’s material is a rare 1961 Bank of Western Samoa £5 note with a red “Bank of Western Samoa” overprint. In Choice About Uncirculated-58, the note is the sole example graded by Paper Money Guaranty – “a testament to its rarity,” according to auctioneers – while “just a few other examples” are recorded in Track and Price’s digital census.
The example on offer this August is expected to bring at least $20,000 US (about $25,100 Cdn.) as Lot 30504.