To begin with I never met the man and as a father of young boys that is probably a good thing. I am appreciative that the justice system finally incarcerated him, though if the stories are true it was much too late, because hissexual preferences were not a secret, a long time before he was finally jailed. All that ickiness aside he was a very talented numismatist and his published works speak for themselves, as a number of numismatists here have pointed out. My real objection to the man is that much of his numismatics have been debunked. His population estimates seem to have been created from limited (or no) actual data in many cases. Also he was willing to put his name behind all kinds of coins that he shouldn't have. By this I mean that he would write formal letters for coins that said, "I Walter Breen have examined such-and-such a coin and have determined it to be something-important. Signed, Walter Breen" Unfortunately those letters aren't worth anything because he would do it for just about anything. I have personally handled a number of coins with letters like that and without exception NGC and PCGS disagree (rightly so) with Breen's evaluation of the coin as a specimen or a unique branch proof, or a test striking, or whatever. It is a huge pain to tell an heir that not only is the item not as described by their now deceased loved one but it was also mis-described to him by a popular and prominent numismatic dealer. That conversation rarely ends well and it is this malfeasance in the way he handled people's numismatic trust that leads me to disregard his professional work.
I seem to remember him wandering around coin shows in a tied died tshirt looking like a cross between Jerry Garcia and Rupert from survivor. Lack
Walter had been arrested for child molestation once before. As part of a plea bargin the family did not prosecute but Breen was placed on probation. Several years later he was again arrested for molesting another boy. He was in prison not for the molestation but for violating his parole from the first case. Eventually he probably would have gone to trial for the second molestation, but he died before that could happen. He catches a lot of flak for his rarity estimates in his encyclopedia but what a lot of people do not realize is that a LOT of the book, including a great many of those estimates, was written in the 1950's thirty years or more before it was published.
True, he was allegedly working on it for decades. Old timers, (maybe I am one now lol), used to not believe it would actually ever be published. He truly was a pioneer in many fields, and his colonial contributions began in the 50's. As it was, the timing of publication was probably fortuitous. Btw, be careful when searching for Walter Breen books. If you search for them, put a keyword in the title field of "coin". He wrote a book in the 60's regarding his other thoughts that you do not want to run across, or even have history of in your browser.
I would also add that rarity estimates, as opposed to number known, are almost always going to be proven wrong over time as more examples come up. It's just the nature of putting an opionon on the total population. To the point about some things he said being more opionon then fact, well that's what happens in the field of history. There are original source documents, which he reference and you are free to go back to, and then there are his opinion on those. 'History' is only ever someone's educated guess based on limited source documents. As someone else point out, if I had to only have one coin book it would be one written by Breen, all his faults, both scholarly and personally, do not change that.
This is accurate. The picture of him earlier in the thread is very much what he looked like; put him in tie dies and that's what he looked like at coin shows. The first impression I had of him, once when my local coin club invited him to speak at our meeting, was "What a total deadhead!"
I tried to access his major book on US coins at two Connecticut libraries; it was listed as in reference not to be checked out, but when I and the librarians looked for it, it was lost for whatever reasons.
