I just finished reading "The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep". It was written in 1966, and the main character sells a bunch of pre-WWI gold treasure in Beirut (since he was selling it without a clear provenance after sneaking it out of a cache in Turkey, he's forced to sell it for less than the full market rate). It's hard to imagine that nearly 600lbs of gold was worth so little back then. I was wincing a little bit as he sold a pile of primarily 19th century sovereigns with no concern at all to the numismatic premium. I'm curious, how much would a hoard like that bring if it were brought to auction by one of the big auction houses today? Here's the description of what he recovers: How many sovereigns would that be? And how would you go about estimating value without a listing of dates, mint marks, and condition?
69 views and no one wants to venture a guess? According to Krause, a sovereign was 91.7% gold & weighed 7.9881g. 1 pound = 453.59237grams. So, if we're talking just about 550 lbs of gold, that's about 31,231 sovereigns. What does a common date (pre-1915) sovereign sell for? And how many counterfeit/underweight sovereigns would have been found in Turkey (out of every 31k in circulation) at that time period?
Perhaps it has something to do with the book being a work of Fiction. The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep by Lawrence Block First published 1966 "For 48 years a cool 573 pounds and 4 ounces of pure gold lay sealed up under somebody's front porch in a forgotten town in a godforsaken corner of Turkey. Only two people in the world knew about the ../gold. One was an old lady in Brooklyn, who would never again leave her wheelchair. The other was Evan Tanner—adventurer extaordinary, the man who never slept and who was a wee bit crazy in the head... But not too crazy to know that 573 pounds and 4 ounces of gold would bring $371,520 in American greenbacks. Still, crazy enough to risk his life all across Europe and Eurasia just to find out if the old lady was right—and if he would be the only hero in modern history to get away with all the dirty money..." While fictitious, that sounds like fair amount of money in the supposed time-frame. Regardless of the fantasy of the story, no one can know the future performance of a commodity and he would have needed to wait all these years hoping to cash in and not succumb be other thieves, illness or death before realizing such a future profit. Given his situation, cashing out at the time would have been the best way to cover his crime and to reuse the money to buy material he could claim a provenance for, then wait to see where its value went. But, like I said, while we can suspend reality and fantasize about what it, this is all just pure fiction for amusements sake.
That is equiv to 2.6 million dollars that is still good money, if he had melted it now that is 15.3 million dollars but since it is stolen in the black market he would gotten less than half that amount.
