Multi-million dollar stamps

It began when I was ten.  My folks had taken a rare -- unheard of, actually -- trip by themselves to Chicago and Minneapolis, leaving their three children in the grasping hands of our domineering grandmother.  (She was a wonderful woman, actually, but of sterner stuff than our parents.)

As a consolation, my mother brought back a gift for me.  A stamp album, and a package of 500 unsorted stamps.  All was forgiven.  In one fell swoop, she had created a previously unsuspected need, and had fulfilled it.  For days I worked on putting the stamps onto the right pages of the album.  In the process, as I've mentioned in a previous post, I mastered such necessary terms as Deutsche Post, Mayar kir Posta, Helvetia, Suomi, Ceskoslovensko, and Osterreich -- terms that surely create waves of nostalgia in anyone who has ever collected stamps..  

Soon, I discovered I had far too many stamps from countries like Germany and Austria to fit on the few allotted pages of my stamp book, and I focused my attention on United States stamps, with a new book devoted to American stamps alone.  But my horizons had already been expanded to the entire world, and I kept my eyes open to philatelic (the term with which we preferred to dignify our obsession) news from other lands.

It was hard to be a philatelist, with his eye on prices and rarities, without knowing the legend of the One Unique Stamp -- the stamp of which only one example was known to exist -- the fabulous British Guiana One-Cent Magenta.  British Guiana (today's Guyana) probably didn't generate a lot of mail back in 1856, when the stamp was issued.  I'm not surprised that only one still exists.  But what's it worth?  Determining the value of a unique item isn't like determining the value of a share of Microsoft stock.  There is no daily trading in the item to fall back on.  Apparently, the last known sales price dates from the reign of King George V who found himself outbid in the 1920s with a sales price of $32,250 (about $500,000 in 2021 dollars).  

But the New York Times reports today that the One-Cent Magenta will soon be on the auction block.  Its owner, a 79-year-old shoe designer, has decided to sell his collection because his heirs would prefer to inherit money, rather than awkward items like stamps.  Anything else of note in his collection?

Actually, yes.  Another icon of my childhood was the "upside down airplane" stamp -- more formally, the "Inverted Jenny."  One sheet of the 24-cent 1918 U.S. airmail stamp was printed with the airplane flying upside down.  According to the Times, the sheet was sold by a post office to a clerk.  The government high-handedly tried to get it back, but failed, and the sheet was sold off, stamp by stamp, over the years.  All except for the plate block of four stamps, with the attached plate number, which also ended up in the shoe designer's hands.

Oh, and he also owns the only legally sellable example of the U.S. 1933 Double Eagle (twenty dollar) gold coin.  All copies of the coin -- a beautifully designed coin, with the same design as those of earlier years -- were supposed to be turned into the government and melted down when America went off the gold standard in April, 1933.   Failure to turn the coins in to the Federal Reserve (and receive compensation) was punishable by a fine of $10,000 and imprisonment for ten years.

Anyway, ownership of the One-Cent Magenta, the Inverted Jenny, and the Double Eagle is sort of a trifecta in the world of collecting.  If I owned them, it would break my heart to  break up the collection and sell them (although the anticipated purchase price would be some consolation).  It would even break my heart to sell my boyhood collection of highly unremarkable U.S. stamps!

Interested in buying?  Check with Sotheby's.  They're handling the sales.