To Delight Stamp Collectors, Postal Service Turns a Famous Mistake Upside Down By MATTHEW HEALEY Published: October 6, 2013 In an effort to rekindle the public’s excitement over stamp collecting and interest a new generation in the hobby, the United States Postal Service has created an instant stamp rarity — a twist on one of the world’s most famous and valuable stamps. The campaign involves the post office’s recent reprint of the classic 95-year-old stamp error known to collectors as the Inverted Jenny, which shows a Curtiss JN-4 biplane, or a “Jenny,” printed upside down. That 24-cent airmail stamp, America’s first, was intended for mail carried on an experimental air service between Washington and New York. One bright morning in 1918, a collector named William T. Robey walked into his local post office to buy some stamps, and his life was changed forever. When Mr. Robey spotted the glaring misprint, he knew he had struck gold. He promptly resold his full sheet of 100 inverts to a dealer and bought himself a new house with the proceeds. No further examples of the error ever surfaced, and nowadays when one of the vintage inverts comes up for sale, it reliably fetches a six-figure price. Last month, for the opening of the William H. Gross stamp gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington, the Postal Service reissued the Inverted Jenny, this time with a face value of $2, in mini-sheets of six with a decorative border. The original dies were used as a basis for the design, and the stamps were printed using the same intaglio engraving process as the originals. The press run was more than two million, according to the service, but included in the run were some intentional “errors” that postal officials did not publicize. “We thought, wouldn’t it be funny if some of the inverts came out wrong, and actually got printed right side up?” the postmaster general, Patrick R. Donahoe, said in an interview. “And we started thinking, what a great way to recreate the excitement Robey must have felt when he found that first sheet.” As a result, 100 of the new sheets actually show the airplane flying upright. Each sheet is individually wrapped, so no one can see the stamps before they are bought. A note is included with the right-side-up rarities, alerting buyers to their true nature. Lucky finders can obtain a certificate signed by the postmaster general. “The last time we had a stamp issue everybody got excited about was the Elvis stamp, 20 years ago,” Mr. Donahoe said. Patricia Moeser, a philatelist who is one of the organizers of a major international stamp collectors’ convention in New York in 2016, said on Saturday that she welcomed any effort by the Postal Service to increase interest in stamp collecting. “Gimmick is the right word,” she said. “But there’s nothing wrong with that.” Charles Snee, the catalog editor for Scott Publishing in Sidney, Ohio, which prints an annual listing of all stamps and their values, said he would not be surprised to see the value of the right-side-up sheets rise quickly, to at least several hundred dollars. One of the first right-side-up rarities was found by a Canadian collector, Glenn Watson of Newmarket, Ontario. According to the Postal Service, Mr. Watson, a longtime collector of United States and Canadian stamps, had ordered the sheet from the postal store on eBay. He called his discovery a “total surprise.” The decision to intentionally produce an instant rarity, sure to rise drastically in price, is a reversal of past policy, when the Postal Service fought to keep valuable errors out of collectors’ hands, even going to court to do so. Mr. Donahoe said that this time, the service’s main concern was to let the public “have some fun” with stamps.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 04:38:35 +0000
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