Philately's Greatest Error

Philately's most spectacular errors. Each time it's been sold since 1984, it has set new world records.

Should anyone ever ask you if errors aren’t the most enchanting pastime in philately, here’s the stamp to tell them about! And like many famous errors, it is a stamp with quite a story. It all begins in 1885 with a young stamp collector who made an interesting discovery.

The stamp is called the "3 skilling-banco error of color" which is cancelled "Nya Kopparberget 13 July 1857". It was first issued by Sweden in 1857 and, because of a horrible mistake on the part of the stamp’s printer, a handful of the 3-skilling-banco issue were printed in yellow instead of the normal green ink. At the time of the stamps’ release, this fact was not known by anyone—and was certainly complete overlooked by both the printer and Swedish postal officials.

But then, in 1886, young stamp collector Georg Wilhelm Backman was rummaging through some old envelopes in his grandmother’s attic and found one particular cover (envelope) bearing a seemingly common stamp, but in a color he had never seen before: yellow instead of green. The next year, when offering some of his stamps for sale, Backman sold the error to Stockholm stamp dealer Heinrich Lichtenstein for 7 kronor...or about the equivalent of 50 U.S. cents at the time.Thereafter, the stamp went into several different collections of philatelist who, in essence, recognized that the stamp was rare. But HOW rare was not a subject of discussion in the worldwide hobby until the error was sold by German stamp dealer Sigmund Friedl in 1894 to the most famous collector of the period: Count Philipp la Renotiere von Ferrary. The price Ferrary paid to add it to his collection (at the time the largest worldwide collection of stamps known to exist) was just 4,000 gulden...then the equivalent of about $3,000.

There the Swedish "error of color" remained until 1922. All during this nearly 30-year period, Ferrary and other serious philatelists understood that the stamp was quite rare, perhaps even Sweden’s rarest stamp of all. But in the worldwide scheme of philately, its importance was still yet to be realized. After all, supposedly other stamps (like the famous British Guiana 1856 Penny Magenta, touted even today as the world’s rarest stamp) were even rarer and more important.By 1922, Ferrary had fallen on hard times and his collection was confiscated by the Germany government and ordered to be sold so as to pay some of the country’s reparations (war debts) from World War I. In a world-famous auction held in that year, the Swedish Baron Eric Leijonhufyud purchased the stamp for 35,250 French francs...or about $5,000.

Four years later, in 1926, Claes A. Tamm, a renowned collector who was devoted to assembling a totally complete collection of Sweden, convinced the Baron to sell it to him for 1,500 British pounds...or about $10,000. The acquisition made his collection complete. Two years later (obviously bored by the fact that he had no new worlds to conquer), the Baron sold the stamp to a Swedish collector by the name of Dr. Ramberg for 2,000 pounds ($15,000.

In 1937, the stamp changed hands again and the fame of the error really began to blossom. It was sold by the London auction firm of H.R. Harmer to King Carol II of Rumania for 5,000 pounds—or better than $30,000. It changed hands one more time by mid-century (1950) when it was privately sold to Rene Berlingen of Germany for an unknown figure. And there the Swedish "3-skilling-banco error of color" remained until 1984 when it went on the block at the David Feldman auction house in Zurich, Switzerland. By that time, the world’s serious specialists were quite aware that, the British Guiana Penny Magenta notwithstanding, the Swedish error was perhaps the most valuable stamp in the world. The stamp, sold to an elderly collector of Scandinavia, realized 977,500 Swiss Francs...or over $500,000. This was the highest price in the world ever paid for a single stamp.

In 1990, it again was sold by Feldman. And again, the stamp set a world record exceeding well over $1 million!

Finally, the stamp was to set one more world record—and cause such a stir that the news of its sale was to be broadcast on television newcasts worldwide. On November 8, 1996, shortly before it was shown to the public at the New York Collectors Club’s Anphilex stamp show at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, it was again sold at a Feldman auction for 2,500,000 Swiss francs...or nearly $1.5 million.

Philatelic dreams are made of such stories. The Swedish error is, of course, only one of many great rarities—and certainly one of the two most famous. The other, British Guiana’s Penny Magenta, may not be the world’s rarest stamp anymore. Feldman may have helped to discover another example of this renowned stamp. If it turns out to be the real thing and there are actually TWO copies of the British Guiana, then the Swedish error will own, outright, the fully-blossomed title of "World Rarest Stamp."

The Inverted Jenny

The war was on. Time was running short, and though haste makes waste, it's also true that one man's junk is another man's gold. That was never truer for stamp collectors then back in Washington, DC, in 1918.

On May 6 Congress set the rate for air mail postage at 24¢ and authorized the United States Post Office to print stamps to be ready for sale a few days before the official inaugural flight on May 15.

100 out of two million

Though planes were new, and many people hadn't actually seen any of the new fangled aeroplanes, the War Department and Post Office were both interested in knowing how air service could increase communications. It was the same drive for speed and efficiency that drove the Pony Express, the R.P.O's, the telegraph, telephone and would later spur e-mail.

The U.S. Army Air Corp would bring the plane and pilot. The Post Office would bring the mail, and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing would provide the country's first air mails stamps. With less than two weeks to go, there was no time to lose and production of the stamps immediately went into high gear.

Perhaps it was the sense of national purpose of a country involved in its first modern world war, advanced planning or cutting a few corners, but the U.S.'s first air mail stamps officially went on sale on May 13. Then no one knew knew that out of some two million stamps there were 100 gems.

Robey

William T. Robey was a stamp collector living in Washington, DC. He had a job as a stockbroker's clerk and on his lunch hour he went to the post office on New York Avenue near 13th Street to buy some of the newly released air mail stamps.

An astute stamp collector immediately notices major errors. Imperforate stamps and upside-down designs have a way of leaping out from the bottoms of cardboard boxes, and Robey's heart stopped when he saw the sheet that the counter clerk put down on the counter for him to look at. Instead of buying a couple of stamps, Robey bought the whole sheet.

Robey told a few friends about the stamps he'd bought and went to work, but someone in his office went right over to the P.O. on NY Avenue to buy more of those upside-down airplane stamps. A few hours later postal inspectors were asking Robey to sell the sheet back to them. Robey's office mate had told them where to find Robey.

Two plates

The Jenny airmail is a simple design: a red frame surrounding a blue plane printed on plain white paper. But it's this two-color design that's responsible for the Inverted airplane in the center.

In order to print stamps in two colors with the printing technology of the time meant that an engraved plate containing the design had to be made for each color. The Jenny had a red plate (the frame) and a blue plate (the vignette).

The printing process for two plates started with a blank sheet of paper. The printing press was fitted out with the frame plate and loaded with red ink, and blank paper was fed into the press. After a sufficient quantity of sheets were printed with the red frames, the plate and ink were changed.

Then the frame-printed sheets were fed into a press loaded with the center design plate (in this case the "Jenny") and blue ink. It was a simple, mechanical process that went off without a hitch thousands of times, and in the Jenny's case 19,999 times.

An undetected error.

The tiny error that produced the Inverted Jenny may have been made when the red-frame printings were coming out of the press. A printer may simply have handled one of the sheets to check for ink quality and then laid it onto the stack of other sheets upside-down in relation to the rest of the stack.

Whatever the case, the red-frame sheet was fed into the blue-vignette press upside-down, and as far as we know, it only happened once for no other Inverted Jenny sheet was ever found and the Post Office never reported discovering any at Post Offices around the country.

Naturally, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving may have produced a few inverts in the shop, but mis-printed stamps caught by inspectors aren't released as stamps and are known as "printer's waste." When such stamps are sold over the counter at a Post Office, then they become errors. A small difference that means a lot.

Other Inverted Jenny sheets were probably tossed into a burn barrel at the print shop, and Robey's sheet was just the one mistake that the inspector did not catch. But in light of the effort USPO put into retrieving the Robey sheet, it's more probable that all four panes of the Inverted sheet were sent to post offices around the country.

More than likely, the DC office on NY Avenue reported the 100 Inverts first, as they would have had them available for sale more quickly than other offices around the country. Afterward postal inspectors probably alerted postmasters to diligently check for mis-printed Jenny sheets, which may be why none of the other 300 stamps seem to have been sold or entered the mail stream.

(On the other hand, if and when someone finds an Inverted Jenny on a legitimate cover, I'll revise this story.)

Thank god for Robey.

Thank god Robey was a stamp collector. Otherwise, the Post Office clerk may have sold the sheet off by one's and two's before noticing the error and taking the stamps off sale. In which case, there might be just five or 10 Inverted Jennys known to have been sold, and because they would have been used as postage, that might leave us with maybe one existing error.

But Robey was a stamp collector and immediately knew what he had bought for $24. When the postal inspectors left his office with the stamps, Robey decided that he'd better sell the stamps before the government confiscated them and he contacted Eugene Klein, a stamp dealer in Philadelphia.

Ed Green

Reportedly Robey got $15,000 from Klein, who then turned around and sold the sheet for $20,000 to Edward Green, a New York stamp dealer and son of Hetty Green, who was the legendary "Witch of Wall Street."

In Green's hands in New York the sheet of Inverted Jennys within weeks blossomed into the Taj Mahal of stamps, the Fort Knox of collecting, the Mona Lisa of timbromanie, the Holy Grail of philately. Green broke up the sheet and sold single stamps and blocks of four to friends.

The sheet of 100 Inverted Jennys was actually a pane of 100 stamps cut from a full press run sheet of 400. Robey's stamps were the lower left-hand pane of the press sheet and was cut from the full sheet with a straight edge. That meant that a certain amount of stamps didn't have perforations all around, but instead had straight-edge cuts as they were on the outer edges.

The sheet was laid out 10 stamps wide and 10 stamps top-to-bottom. Nine stamps had straight-edge tops, and nine had straight-edges on their right-hand side. One stamp, form the upper right-hand corner, had no perfs on top or on the right-hand side. That leaves just 81 fully perfed stamps.

Today, each stamp of the original 100 is known by its plate position, e.g. #86 or #21, and the fate of each is watched closely.

Inverted Jenny Facts

» Green sold the first ten stamps for $250 each and then raised the price to $350. Soon his price was at $650. He sold 35 stamps for $250 - $650.

» One man claims his Inverted Jenny single was inadvertantly sucked up in a vacuum by his maid. Apparently, he'd left the stamp on his table, from where it must have been blown down to the carpet. He was able to retrieve it, but it's no longer the pristine stamp it once was.

» Four stamps have been stolen and only two recovered. In an attempt to obscure their origin, thieves cut off the perfs from the stamps, though they can't have known how carefully these stamps have been studied.

» Seven of the Inverted Jennys have been reported destroyed or lost in one way or another over the years and many more have been the victim of improper handling and storage. Hinges have damaged the gum and caused thins. Some have creases and others are toned showing that they have been in contact with acidic paper for long periods of time.

» Green didn't sell the straight-edge stamps and put these in his safe. After Green's death in 1936, they were taken out and found to have been stuck together. They were unstuck, but the soaking removed the gum. In 1942 the first straight-edge Inverted Jenny auctioned for $1,750 to a man from Baltimore. The next copy went for $1,350, and eight others went for $750 to $1,300. Copies of the fully perforated and gummed stamps sold at auction for $1,150 to $3,300. Today they auction in the $120,000 range.

» Green's blocks of Inverted Jennys were also sold to settle his estate after his death: the left arrow block sold for $13,750; the center line, $22,000; the initialed corner margin block, $17,000; and the bottom plate block and arrow block were still joined as a block of eight, selling for $27,000. Nw York dealer Y. Souren bought them all. Recently a block was up for auction with a value of $750,000.

» Green encased a copy of the Inverted Jenny in a locket along with a common copy of the 24¢ stamp and gave it to his wife Mabel who kept it until she died in 1950. The stamp and locket was offered at the Siegel Galleries' Rarities Auction in 2002 for $170,000 US.

» There is reportedly one used copy of the Inverted Jenny. Mr. Green was out of town and his wife Mabel wanted to send him an air mail letter. Apparently, she went into Green's study and used one of the 24¢ air mail stamps on his desk to post her letter. Thereafter Mr. Green kept the stamp in a pendent on his watch chain.

Values then and now.

I wanted to figure out what the value of 1918 money was in 2001. My first calculation was easy. $20,000 in 1918 is equal to $236,424 in US dollars in 2001. I got this figure from the online form at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis.

The face value of the pane of 100 24¢ stamps was more intriguing. Though today, $24-1918 value is worth $284 in 2001 US dollars, I wondered what the face value of 100 air mail stamps would be if we had air mail today?

I calculated that 1918 air mail was eight-times the 3¢ first-class rate, and with 2001's first-class rate at 34¢ I calculated the value of 100 imaginary 2001 air mail stamps at $272.

To make a long story short, the first transaction brought $20,000 for a $24 outlay, or a return of about 83000%, which was not bad for a trip to the post office and a whole lot of luck.

Catalogue

In plane sight.