Never before seen: 1.7 million dollars (approximately 1.59 million euros) under the hammer ($2,006,000, with fees), this is the record price which was recorded on November 8, in the United States, during an auction organized by Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries. This 1918 U.S. Airmail stamp has a face value of 24 cents. It depicts a Curtiss Jenny JN-4 biplane.
Named “Jenny inverted”, because it was affected by a printing error – its center was printed upside down by mistake (printing in two “passes”) – this stamp is one of the stars of world philately.
Indeed, this stamp reached $4.86 million in June 2021, but it was in fact a block of four, while we have to go back to 2007 to find a bid of $977,500 for one. isolated room, still at Siegel’s.
The millionaire stamp was purchased in 1918 by Eugene Klein, a philatelic merchant from Philadelphia, who himself bought it for $15,000 from a certain William T. Robey, post office buyer of the only sheet of one hundred copies released. service, priced at $24. It remained in a safe for almost a century before successfully hitting the auction block.
Symbol of the popularity of this stamp, the United States Postal Service (USPS) published, in 2013, a matched reprint worth $2 of this stamp in a sheet comprising six vignettes.
Stamps with a “variety” print are among the rarest. This is evidenced by the “Treskilling banco jaune” (3 skilling) from Sweden – normally green for this value – printed by mistake in the color yellow in 1857, during a printing of 8 skilling yellow stamps (2.875 million Swiss francs in 1996). , sold in 2010 at a price that remained confidential).
To remain in the category of “reversed centers”, a Japanese stamp from 1871 reached 5.4 million euros on June 3; an American stamp issued for a Pan-American Exposition in 1901 is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; the rarest stamp in Belgium is the “Inverted Dendermonde” (1920), of which less than twenty copies are known (counting over 100,000 euros); an Australian 4 pence stamp from 1855 which depicts an upside-down swan has an estimate in tens of thousands of euros; more modestly, a stamp from Indochina (1892-1896) whose legend “Indio-China” is reversed costs 10,500 euros, just like a few stamps from the French Somali Coast, the latter much less expensive… Enough to start with a reasonable price an original collection.