The renowned marble collection formed by Paul Baumann had its beginnings in the summer of 1952, when Baumann was a mere five years old. His parents were antique collectors who enjoyed prowling through shops, but they worried about their son’s short attention span and wanted to think of a way to keep him occupied. The solution Paul’s dad devised was to give the boy a portion of his own marble collection, with instructions to keep an eye out for similar types of marbles during their shopping expeditions.

“That was what sparked a lifetime of marble collecting and expert scholarship on the subject,” observed auctioneer Dan Morphy, a marble collector himself. “Paul was way ahead of his time.” He wrote Collecting Antique Marbles, a key reference work for the field, that was released in 1970 and has been reissued in four editions through 2004, with 44,000 copies sold, a very substantial number for a relatively narrow collecting specialty. A total of 430 lots from the Baumann collection are included in this auction.

Reference note by p4A editorial staff, November 2011.