Heritage Auctions

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Heritage Auctions was founded in Dallas, Texas, in 1976 by a young man who had dropped out of the University of Texas at Austin nine years earlier to start selling rare coins. Steve Ivy's small numismatic operation would eventually grow into a world that trades in Nobel Peace Prize medals, Hollywood ruby slippers, and the jerseys of basketball legends. How did a coin dealer from Dallas become the world's third largest auction house? And what kind of organization attracts both the estate of Neil Armstrong and a 70-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton in the same decade? The answers trace through a partnership formed in 1982, a string of categories no traditional auction house was willing to touch, and a particular willingness to wade into legal fights that most rivals would avoid.

• 2. Two Collectors, One Company

  ›

  Jim Halperin had built a successful rare coin business in Boston before he made the decision to sell it, pack up, and move to Dallas to become Ivy's partner in 1982. He did not come alone. Marc Emory arrived alongside him and went on to oversee a portion of Heritage's European operations. Greg Rohan joined the company four years later, in 1986, and rose to become president. Beyond that original core, the partnership grew to include Paul Minshull, Ryan Carroll, Todd Imhof, Cristiano Bierrenbach, Todd Hignite, Dustin Johnston, Joe Maddalena, Sarah Miller, and Sam Spiegel. The multi-partner structure gave Heritage a depth of specialist knowledge that no single collector could provide on their own. When the company introduced a memorabilia department in 2003, its inaugural auction was valued at approximately $2 million, a sign of how far the company had traveled from rare coins alone. Seven years later, in 2010, Heritage launched a luxury items division covering jewelry, handbags, and accessories, with individual rare pieces sometimes selling for more than two hundred thousand dollars.

• 3. Record After Record

  ›

  On the 25th of August 2024, Babe Ruth's called shot jersey sold through Heritage for $24.12 million, making it the most expensive sports collectible in history at the time. It eclipsed the $12.6 million Heritage itself had set two years earlier for a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle baseball card. Ruth's jersey was not an isolated peak. On the 7th of December 2024, the screen-matched ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale in the 1939 MGM film sold for $32.5 million, a figure Heritage described as the Holy Grail of Hollywood memorabilia. Comic books followed their own ascending arc. A CGC 9.6 copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 sold in September 2021 for $3.6 million, an all-time record at that point. Then, on the 7th of April 2024, a 1938 Action Comics #1 sold for $6 million, the most expensive comic book ever sold. The coin side kept pace. At the Florida United Numismatist auction on the 14th of January 2024, an 1855 Kellogg and Co. $50 piece sold for $1.26 million, an 1860 Half Eagle brought $1.14 million, and an 1851 Schultz and Co. Half Eagle drew $1.02 million, more than double its prior auction record. A single Pokémon Pikachu Illustrator promo card graded PSA 9 sold in March 2026 for $1,406,250.

• 4. Art, Culture, and the Unexpected

  ›

  Frank Frazetta's painting Dark Kingdom sold at Heritage in June 2023 for $6 million, setting a record for both a Frazetta work and for any original comic book or fantasy art. The painting had lived two prior public lives: as the cover of Karl Edward Wagner's 1976 novel Dark Crusade and as the cover of Molly Hatchet's 1979 album Flirtin' With Disaster. The original cover art for the first issue of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, published by DC Comics in February 1986, achieved $2.4 million at a June 2022 Heritage sale, the most expensive mainstream American comic book cover art sold publicly at that time. Concert posters traced a similar arc. A 1953 Hank Williams poster for a New Year's Day concert in Canton, Ohio sold for $150,000 on the 1st of May 2021. Heritage broke that record the following April with a rare 1966 Beatles Shea Stadium poster at $275,000. Both records fell in November 2022, when a poster for the concert Buddy Holly was traveling to when he died sold for $447,000 to Jim Irsay. By 2013, Heritage was also auctioning modern and contemporary works by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Joan Mitchell, and Edward Ruscha. Joseph Christian Leyendecker's painting Beat-up Boy, Football Hero, the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, sold for a record $4.12 million on the 7th of May 2021.

• 5. Coins, Currency, and Americana

  ›

  On the 24th of January 2021, Heritage sold the world's most valuable gold coin, a 1787 New York-style Brasher Doubloon, for $9.36 million. The Paramount Collection of world and ancient coins, auctioned on the 25th-the 27th of March 2021, reached $41,941,592, making it the most valuable world and ancient coins auction at that time. It included a $2.28 million record for the most expensive British coin ever sold publicly. In January 2019, a 1943 Lincoln cent sold for $204,000; the copper coin had been struck in error in 1943, when copper was being conserved for the war effort. In August 2023, Heritage concluded the auction of Harry W. Bass Jr.'s rare coin collection for $83.6 million. Bass had been an oil man and philanthropist, and the proceeds were directed to dozens of North Texas nonprofits supported by his foundation, along with a $40 million gift that founded the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas. A US $20 bill bearing a Del Monte sticker sold on the 5th of January 2021, for $396,000, a record for the most expensive error note ever sold.

• 6. A Global Footprint

  ›

  Heritage moved from three Dallas-area locations to a consolidated world headquarters on the 1st of June 2020. The 160,000 square foot facility sits at the northwest corner of West Airport Freeway and Valley View Lane, near Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, inside the DFW Airport international trade zone. Of the company's 600 employees, 450 are based there. New York operations on Park Avenue are focused on fine arts. A Beverly Hills office on Olympic Boulevard handles the West Coast. Heritage acquired Greg Martin Auctions in San Francisco in 2011, adding a weapons and armament division. Hong Kong opened in 2015, and Heritage also acquired MPO in IJsselstein, in the Netherlands, that same year. MPO had been founded in 1988 as a coin and stamp fair organizer and began conducting auctions in 1999. The merger brought with it a Belgium office in Zaventem, near Brussels. A Florida branch opened in Palm Beach in spring 2017, followed by offices in Chicago and London later that year. By 2024, showrooms and offices in Tokyo and Munich had been added, and a Canada branch was announced for the future.

• 7. Controversies and Courts

  ›

  Heritage has fought its legal battles in both directions. In 2014, Heritage sued Christie's after the rival house hired Heritage's primary handbag expert along with two additional specialists, alleging breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets. Christie's had recently acquired an art-management software company called Collectrium in 2015, and the following year Heritage filed a second lawsuit against Christie's and Collectrium, alleging copyright infringement through improper web scraping of three million Heritage listings. In 2019, a judge ruled Collectrium owed Heritage close to $1.8 million of the $49 million Heritage had initially sought, dismissing the broader claims. In 2012, the country of Mongolia sued Heritage after it auctioned a 75-percent-complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, arguing that Mongolian law prohibits fossil exports. Heritage subsequently helped the Mongolian government resolve ownership, storing the specimen until it could be legally returned. In 2024, the Atlanta Braves sent a cease and desist letter contesting Heritage's claim to hold all the bases from Hank Aaron's 714th home run game, noting one base had been donated to a museum in 1982. Heritage filed a lawsuit in response. On the 13th of April 2024, Heritage played a role in a different kind of resolution, authenticating the original USS Enterprise model from Star Trek after fans spotted it listed on eBay. The model was returned to Rod Roddenberry, son of Gene Roddenberry, with an estimated value of more than $1 million.

• 8. Sales at Scale

  ›

  In the immediate period following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Heritage recorded $41 million in online sales, a figure that represented roughly 10 percent of its full-year online sales from 2019, which had reached $483 million. In 2022, total sales surpassed $1.45 billion, a figure that excludes the charity auction for Dmitry Muratov's Nobel Peace Prize medal, which sold on the 21st of June 2022, for $103.5 million, the highest price ever paid for a Nobel medal. Every dollar of that medal's proceeds went to UNICEF for refugee relief. In 2023 Heritage ranked third among Western auction houses at $1.76 billion in total sales. The 2024 figure reached $1.867 billion, the highest in the company's history at that point, before the 2025 total surpassed $2.15 billion, completing the company's fifth consecutive record year. The Dmitry Muratov Nobel sale, excluded from the headline figures, stands as one of the more unusual transactions in Heritage's history: a journalism prize, sold under auction conditions, its entire value redirected to children displaced by war.