Turning Stamp Collecting Upside Down

One hundred years ago today, a day after the United States Post Office issued its first air mail stamp - for domestic air mail, of course, as transoceanic airmail wouldn't be possible until the late 1930s - stamp collector William Robey experienced every stamp collector's dream when he bought a 100-stamp pane of the 24-cent Jenny stamp, so called because it depicted a Curtiss JN biplane, in a Washington, D.C. post office.  For a mere $24 - the same price Dutch colonist Peter Minuit paid the Indians for Manhattan Island - Robey got an investment that paid back handsomely.  He resisted early efforts to get him to sell the pane, risking a bigger fortune in the event that other inverted-center panes turned up, but he carefully waited for the right moment to sell it.

As it turned out, eight other panes of the Jenny stamp had been printed upside down when the printing-press workers fed the stamps in the red printing press one way and fed them in the blue printing press the other way.  Numerous bicolor stamps of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been printed with inverted vignettes before, but quality control had so improved by 1918 that only one inverted pane of this bicolor stamp got through.  The other eight were destroyed by the Post Office.

Robey was pressured by the government to return the stamps to postal authorities, but he continued to wait for an opportunity to sell his stamps.  He did so in a few days, selling them to stamp dealer Eugene Klein for $15,000 - about $258,000 in today's money.  Klein than sold the pane to Colonel Edward H.R. Green for $20,000; Green then numbered each stamp on the back with a pencil, according to their pane positions, and broke it up into blocks and singles.  In 1969, a single stamp sold for $280,000; for comparative purposes, Robey's original sale price of $15,000 for the whole pane was the same as $37,000 in 1969 money.  Copies of the stamp have gone missing, one stolen and recovered after many years, and the Mystic Stamp Company owns the plate block - a block of four stamps with the color plate numbers in the selvage - from the pane.  A single stamp is now worth $977,000.

Most stamp errors are hard to quantify, but it is an established fact that there are no more than one hundred Inverted Jenny stamps.  It remains the greatest error printing in U.S. philatelic history. 

The rate for domestic air mail in 1918 went down to sixteen cents, then six cents, as air mail service improved - the 16-cent and six-cent stamps issued later that year, not so coincidentally, were each issued on one color only.