Forbes Toy Collection at Sotheby's NY

Bloomberg has an article on an upcoming December sale of toys from the collection of Malcolm Forbes at Sotheby's in NY.  There was a previous Forbes sale many appraiser might remember of toys and toy soldiers back in 1994 that brought a lot of publicity and very high prices.  I would think Sotheby's is planning for the same type of results from the collection of the late publisher of Forbes magazine.

The sale is expected to generate between $3 and $5 million.  Given the noterity of Forbes and the success of the 1994 sale, this auction should be another good sale for comparable property with excellent provenance.  According to the article, the toy collection is owned by Forbes Media, which has seen a decline in advertising dollars.

The Bloomberg article states

Forbes, which auctioned part of its famous toy collection in 1994, is selling the rest of its miniature soldiers, boats and motorcycles, as well as an early version of the Monopoly board game.

The company that publishes Forbes magazine has cut staff in recent years because of a decline in advertising, and it sold its Greenwich Village headquarters to New York University in January.

The toy sale is estimated to raise between $3 million and $5 million. The collection, acquired over four decades by the late Malcolm Forbes and his sons, has been a fixture at the Forbes Galleries in New York for the past quarter-century.

“My brothers and I concluded it was best that others now have a chance to own them, collect them and maybe even wind them up in a pond or pool and watch them go,” company vice president Robert Forbes said in a statement provided by Sotheby’s.

Four years after Malcolm Forbes’s death in 1990, the family auctioned part of the toy collection at Sotheby’s for $393,000. Forbes’s collection of Faberge Imperial Easter eggs was sold to Russian tycoon Viktor Vekselberg for an undisclosed price in 2004.

To read the full Bloomberg article, click HERE.