James L. Halperin is the co-founder and co-chairman of Heritage Auctions (HA.com). Heritage, which he co-founded in 1982, is now an in-demand online auction house destination with reported total sales exceeding $1.45 billion in 2022.
Halperin was born in Boston in 1952. He grew up watching his father build a successful manufacturing business. As a summer project in 1968, Halperin formed a part-time stamp and coin shop. That same year he received early acceptance to Harvard College. By his third college semester, Halperin became more focused on his coin business than his studies. At the end of 1971, he left Harvard to found New England Rare Coin Galleries (NERCG) and pursue a full-time numismatic career.
“Heritage and the collecting field benefited when Jim used insights gleaned from his research for and marketing of those novels to help redesign Heritage’s website, pioneering the first free Permanent Auction Archive in the auction business among other innovations.”
In 1975, Halperin co-designed protocols for the coin field’s first mainframe computer system which would help catapult NERCG to the top of the industry. He also established the first registered rare coin fund in 1975, which raised $375,000 and was successfully liquidated at auction for $2.15 million in 1980, providing its investors a nearly fivefold return after fees and auction commissions in under five years.
In 1982, Halperin merged part of NERCG with his friend and former archrival Steve Ivy’s company to form a 50-50 partnership, renamed Heritage, in Dallas, Texas. He then sold the rest of NERCG to an employee.
Halperin and his business partner Steve Ivy were “significant early investor-shareholders in both PCGS and, later, NGC [Numismatic Guaranty Company] and affiliated companies.”
Halperin also served as an American Numismatic Association Governor from 1989-1991.
With Steve Ivy’s buy-in, though not his delight, Halperin worked at Heritage only half-time for one year in the mid-1990s while authoring two futurist fiction novels. His first, The Truth Machine, published in 1996, became an international science fiction bestseller with over a half-million copies sold in multiple languages and was optioned as a feature film by Warner Brothers, Lionsgate and Revelations Entertainment. Halperin’s second novel, The First Immortal, published in early 1998, was optioned as a Hallmark Hall of Fame television miniseries. Both remain in print.
Jim used insights gleaned from his research for and marketing of those novels to help redesign Heritage’s website, pioneering the first free Permanent Auction Archive in the auction business, among other innovations. After launching its new website in 1998, Heritage quickly became the world’s highest-selling numismatic auction house and has remained so every year since. Heritage subsequently hired hundreds of top experts in numismatics and other collectibles fields and expanded into its globally recognized comics and comic art department, conceived, staffed and still overseen by Halperin.
Coinage’s 14 Numismatists of the Century were named in its 2024 Book of Lists collector edition. They will be individually featured in issues of Coinage throughout 2024. The Book of Lists can be purchased through www.coinagemag.com and at newsstands near you.
