Selling a One-Cent Stamp for Millions of Dollars
The 1856 British Guiana one-cent magenta doesn’t look like much. It is a ruddy, squarish, indistinct stamp, its corners chamfered haphazardly. But appearances can be deceiving: Sotheby’s expects to sell it at auction in June for between ten and twenty million dollars. That would make it the most expensive stamp in the world.
As it happens, stamp collecting is in decline; membership in the American Philatelic Society peaked, in 1988, at nearly fifty-eight thousand. By the end of last month, the rolls had shrunk to fewer than thirty-three thousand, even as the U.S. population has increased by nearly a third. The ranks of hardcore collectors, mostly older men, are thinning. For the young, postage stamps can hardly compete with smart phones.
For the most part, stamp prices have also been stagnant or in decline, with some specimens worth less than their value as postage; this is especially true of mass-produced mid-century stamps. “There simply aren’t enough new collectors around to add this type of material to a collection, and most of the established collectors have already filled their album spaces with such stamps,” Charles Snee, the editor of Linn’s Stamp News, told me in an e-mail.
But that’s not true of all stamps. In 1840, Great Britain issued the world’s first adhesive stamp. The prices of specimens issued between then and the early twentieth century are generally on the rise, Snee says. Among them, the one-cent magenta is perhaps the world’s most coveted stamp. As Sotheby’s tells it, in the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial postal system of British Guiana, in South America, relied on stamps imported from England. In 1856, though, a delayed shipment prompted the Guianan postmaster to seek a local supplier. The Royal Gazette newspaper, using a hand press capable of printing just two stamps at a time, was commissioned to produce stamps known as the four-cent blue, the four-cent magenta, and the one-cent magenta. Four cents was the price of a letter; one-cent stamps were used on the wrapping of newspapers, like the Royal Gazette itself. The stamps were so crude that the postmaster initialled each one, to certify that it wasn’t a fake....MORE
