One cent magenta sets new auction record at Sothebys

Today was hot in Gotham, the heat reflecting from the glass towers, sizzling the pavement and tanning our hides with fury. Towards the evening it abated, with only a gentle glow reflected in the massive buildings that make up the city of New York. One in particular reflected a mild sun towards 6pm; 1334 York Avenue, its glass façade giving some hope of relief from the heat as the ball in the sky lowered itself to give its light to the other side of the planet.

But the cool blue of the glass from this building did not reflect the intense heat inside, where a magenta sliver of thin paper shone like a star; one encased in glass, guarded by security guards who were trying to be discreet and polite to the patrons of an august auction house: Sothebys.

The magenta star reflected such tones of red as any artist would be glad to paint. And any stamp collector would be glad to see in their collection; or at the bottom of a pile of cheap stamps, or perhaps affixed to some old papers in the attic.
It was none other that the world's rarest stamp, the one cent British Guiana magenta, of which already much information has been provided on this blog. It was art; it was history; it was expensive, way, way too expensive for this humble blogger and philatelist to presume to bid on; or even sit in the seat of the bidders. Enough it was to stand at the back of the room and watch. After, of course, having taken a look at the item - especially the verso, on which previous owners had made their marks. Many a time have I viewed a picture of its famous front, but to actually see the back of it was an even rarer privilege than seeing the stamp and its famous signature and cancel. Yes, canceled; to think of it, that the most expensive stamp in the world was thus; and cut corners to boot! With sundry marks that would make any other stamp virtually unsellable.

Would these 'faults' deter the bidders? Not by a long shot; the opening gambit was $4,500,000, soon followed by $5,000,000; then it went in increments of $500,000, only slowing at $7,500,000, whereupon an anonymous phone bidder offered $7,700,000; then another phone bid, and the ante was upped  by $100,000; and a third bid from the phones was to have the last word at $7,900,000, setting yet again a world record for a single stamp; with the premium of 20%, the buyer is out of pocket $9,480,000. The magenta did not fail to shine. It only comes up for auction every few decades, and it, with silent dignity, stands alone.

I went out into the night in the company of members of the Collectors Club and staff at Sothebys with a sense of history having been made. For a few moments, before that hammer fell, we were all the owners of this stamp. And perhaps we will have more chances to bask in its glow, as it has been requested by the Smithsonian for a possible exhibit and also by a New York based philatelic society for an upcoming exhibit. I encourage the reader to go if they can.

Stamps as investment

 

Investing is a tricky business; we have seen South Sea investment bubbles back in the day, tulip crazes, and more recently NASDAQ speculation; all have fallen dramatically after meteoric rises. Even gold enters this paradigm.

 

It would seem sensible that luxuries would suffer; in part, yes. But not entirely. Sometimes hard economic times drive down prices on mediocre items, while pushing up the high end. Money moves into safe havens.

 

One company that monitors collectibles recently published a report on how the prices were doing in this market; surprisingly, over a ten-year period, stamps had risen 255%, beaten only by cars as  a luxury commodity. Knight Frank's Luxury Investment Index (KFLII) reports:

 

Continued price growth in the classic car sector and an upturn in the performance  of investment-grade wines helped to boost the value of KFLII by 7% in the 12 months to the end of June 2013.

 

This matches the increase in the value of residential property in prime central London over the same period and is in stark contrast to the 23% fall in the price of gold since June 2012. The FTSE 100 index of UK listed equities performed slightly better, rising by 12%.

 

Over a 10-year period, however, KFLII (+174%), has significantly outperformed the FTSE 100 (+155%), although gold still remains the top mainstream asset performer (+273%).

 

Looking at the individual asset classes represented within the KFLII, there has been a wide variation in performance over the long and short term. Across every time period classic cars, according to the HAGI Top index, have shown the strongest growth, rising 21% over the past six months and a remarkable 430% over 10 years - even better than gold.

 

After a significant correction in 2011 and 2012 following an overheating in the market for certain wines favoured by Asian buyers, the Liv-ex100 index, which tracks the performance of investment-grade wines, has returned to growth.

 

The art market, by contrast, remains volatile, Although certain artists retain their cache and are achieving record results at auction, buyers are generally bidding more cautiously and selectively.

 

Stamps and coins have maintained their long-term growth trend and are now marketed as genuine investment asset classes. But furniture continues to lose ground as antique styles decline in popularity with homeowners.

 

My own thoughts to add to this are that the fall of NASDAQ after 2000, and the general volatility after 9/11 sent investors scrambling; home furnishing, gold, real estate, etc. Safe havens were hard to find. Not to say that stamps are there to replace equities and real estate, but managers are going with more than the previous figure of 5% as a guide for stamps and coins as part of the portfolio. With the Chinese driving the market, as a nation of philatelists, and the record high estimate of the upcoming one cent magenta ($10-20 million at Sothebys), there is money in stamps. Along with, of course, the pleasure of owning a part of history and art in miniature as so many of them are.

 

[Thanks to Mike Japp of Ango-American, a New York based company that handles stamps and other collectables, for the above information].

 

 

Metropolitan Stamp Expo in New York City 10-12 July 2014

The Metropolitan Stamp Expo will be in town next month. For anyone not familiar with the location, it is on the west side a long block or so from the Hudson River. Be advised that 20 short blocks (#d streets) equal one mile, and 6 long blocks, avenue to avenues - also make a mile, thus if you are on 37th Street and 5th Avenue, it is a 2 mile walk.

Nearest subway stop is Columbus Circle, 1, A/C/E, B/D trains, about a 3/4 mile walk as this lets you out on 8th Avenue at or around 59th St. Buses will get you closer.

I advise checking out the waterside, which has been developed in stages over the years so there is always something new that way before or after the show.

For those of you going on Saturday, let me mention the Chelsea Antiques Market on 25/26th Streets which you can get to on all of the above mentioned trains, 2 1/2 miles away or less if you take Broadway down.  Both the indoor and the outdoor markets have longstanding stamp dealers and great prices.

 

    METROPOLITAN STAMP EXPO

 

 

 

Thursday-Saturday July 10-12

Midtown Holiday Inn,

440 West 57th St.

Within walking distance or a quick cab ride to scores of NY attractions!

Thurs. 10-6, Friday 10-5, Sat. 10-5

Free Literature • Free Appraisals

Free Admission • Convenient Parking

Collectors: go to www.metroexpos.com for details and updates or contact Dick Murphy (see below)

Dealers: SIGN UP NOW!

For dealer space in ALL

Metro Expo Shows:

Dick Murphy, 774-258-0135, DickMurphy@aol.com

British Guiana stamps: Magenta one cent, cotton reels etc.

The postal history of British Guiana (now Guyana)  is most interesting, starting with the 'cottonreels' - depicted below -

   

 

 

that were commissioned in 1850; a basic design was created using by the offices of Joseph Baum and William Dallas, printers and publishers of the Royal Gazette of British Guiana, which was  issued  Wednesdays and Saturdays in Georgetown. The Postmaster used local printers since service was to begin before stamps could  be supplied from Great Britain.

In a memoir by the American humorist Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, it is related how he came to be indentured as a compositor to the Royal Gazette in 1835. In the first part of "Experience during Many Years", serialized in The New England Magazine in 1893, Shillaber relates that “Mr. Baum … was a Pennsylvanian, and Mr. Dallas a light mulatto; and a more perfect gentleman and a better printer I had never met with. He was educated in Scotland and acquired the art of printing there, in all branches of which he was a perfect master. He was affable in the highest degree and always treated me with a kindness which rendered our relations very pleasant.”

The stamps produced in Baum and Dallas’s shop in 1850 were printed by an employee named Henry Mackay, according to Edward Chauncy Luard, the first prominent philatelist in British Guiana. They were circular, and in size and design so reminiscent of the labels found on the ends of spools of thread that they subsequently became known among collectors as “cottonreels.” According to The Postage Stamps and Postal History of British Guiana by W. A. Townsend and F. G. Howe, the cottonreels were printed on a Columbian handpress from individual settings of type. The simple frames were formed by pieces of printer’s brass rule, beveled at one edge and blunt at the other edge, bent into a circular shape and so soldered. Type from the regular case of the Gazette was then set within the circular frame: BRITISH around the top, GUIANA around the bottom, and 4 (8 or 12) Cents in the middle. The type pieces were secured in place with quads and other furniture (or perhaps with chewed paper), imposed and locked in a chase, inked, and printed. 

It is not known how many stamps were printed on a single sheet, but as Townsend has identified four distinct frames (based on thickness, shape, and flaws in the circular rules and by distinctive positions of the letter sorts), it is thought the stamps were printed in a horizontal row of four. The same basic setting of type was used to print stamps of different denominations: to change from one duty to another, the chase would be unlocked, the numeral sort carefully extracted, the new value sort inserted, the chase relocked, and the forme re-inked and printed. To easily differentiate between the values, the stamps were printed in black ink on different colored papers: the four-cent on orange (with a later printing on lemon-yellow); the eight-cent on green; and the twelve-cent on blue shades ranging from pale to indigo.

All examples of the 1850 cottonreels are initialed by Dalton or by one of his subordinates: James Belton Smith, a clerk in the Imperial Branch; H. A. Killikelly, a letter carrier; W. H. Lorimer, likely a railway clerk; and Edmond Dalzell Wight, a clerk in the Colonial Post Office, whose E.D.W. appears on the 1856 One-Cent. The initialing is thought to have been done to thwart counterfeiters, since anyone with a job press and a handful of type could have produced a reasonable facsimile of the Royal Gazette stamps.

While there is no record of how many cottonreels were eventually printed, it is known, based on a Royal Gazette invoice attached to a report that Postmaster Dalton submitted to the colonial legislature on 11 March 1851, how many were printed during the final six months of 1850: 656 12-cent blues, 1,200 8-cent greens, and 1,752 4-cent yellows. The charge for printing the stamps was 50 cents per one hundred regardless of denomination. Curiously, the three stamps survive in almost equal numbers, despite the disparity in the numbers printed, at least through the first half year of production.

[Below is a photo of the 2 cent cottonreel, SG#1/Scott#1]

 

Early in 1851, a fourth value was added to the issue of cottonreel stamps. A 2-cent denomination was printed to cover postal delivery within Georgetown. Postmaster Dalton again used a notice in the Royal Gazette, 22 February 1851, to introduce the new service:
By Order of His Excellency the Governor and upon the request of several of the merchants of Georgetown, it is proposed to establish a Delivery of Letters twice a day through the principal streets of this city, viz., Water-Street, Main-Street, their intermediate streets, and the Brick Dam, as far as the Roman Catholic Chapel. … Each letter must bear a stamp, for which Two Cents will be charged or it will not be delivered, and when called for will be subject to the usual postage of Eight Cents.
Deliveries began on 1 March and were set for 10:00 in the morning and 2:00 in the afternoon. The new stamps were available at the Georgetown Post Office as well as at five stores that were designated as receiving stations.
The 2-cent stamps were printed by Baum and Dallas on rose-colored paper using the same typographic frames as the three earlier values. All ten surviving examples are initialed—two by Dalton, two by Wight, and six by Smith.
Despite the encouragement of “several of the merchants of Georgetown,” this service was discontinued after a short period due to lack of support and the remaining stamps were retained, with some being used as multiples to pay the regular postage of four cents or higher. The 2-cent cottonreel was alluded to in articles over the years but it wasn’t until 1877 that a single specimen appeared in England from a collector in British Guiana. Two more copies appeared in quick succession from the same source and within a year an entire collection of British Guiana stamps arrived in Britain for sale. This collection, which contained the fourth and last single copy of this rarity found to date, was sent to E. L. Pemberton, who was very familiar with the colony’s stamps. Pemberton examined the 2-cent stamp and satisfied himself that it was a genuine copy. But that same collection also included a stamp that Pemberton had never before seen: a small octagonal 1-cent magenta stamp (Scott 13).

 

The whereabouts of the One-Cent Magenta for the last 141 years can be known positively. But the first seventeen years of its existence are shrouded in impenetrable obscurity. The stamp was purchased on or before 4 April 1856, the date it was postmarked, and affixed to an envelope or newspaper wrapper, most likely addressed to a Mr. Andrew Hunter. And sometime in 1873, the stamp was discovered—or recovered—by a nephew of Hunter, a budding stamp collector. For the years between those events, the stamp resided unrecognized and unappreciated on its cover in the tropical heat and humidity of British Guiana.

So there...the world's rarest stamp and its congeners from a small British colony, a nation of around one million inhabitants with but 83,000 sq mi. And to keep up with the history or producing rare stamps, the independent nation of Guyana today manages to produce many collectible issues, especially in the realm of orchids, of which it has no less than 500 stamps, including hundreds of stamps with images from Reichenbachia, collected for their beauty. A singular trait with the Guyana Post Office is the making of overprints, and collectors of this country are challenged with an excessive amount of surcharges and overprints that would drive most philatelists to the brink of madness. Recently I purchased the 1990 set of 8 orchids, after spending two years trying to acquire it; each effort I made was met with offers from dealers who had an endless array of overprints (and none recognised in the catalogues) honouring a plethora of famous people; one suspects that an unscrupulous dealer merely overprinted them himself to charge a premium on the set. It would not surprise me if there were to appear a rare overprint with Osama bin Laden, along with Kennedy, Roosevelt, and sundry other luminaries.

Glad I was to acquire the set without an overprint, which may prove to be the rare (and only genuine) state. [Scott 2359-66]. And I will cherish them until the day that Sothebys sees fit to auction them too! At least if I do not have the 1c magenta, I have 8 beautiful and long sought after stamps that I genuinely enjoy, one of them being vanilla, which appears on around 100 issues worldwide; of which I will be blogging more, I hope to publish a booklet on all such issues when I complete my collection (which is still missing Guyana 2370).

New York stamp deals

Just getting started...after 45 years of collecting. My first endeavours were as a child on E 7th Street. The two other boys in the building also collected. I often wonder where they are, Darryl and Willy. Many fond memories of them and our Minkus pages.

Back in the day, there were many places to shop for stamps, even department stores had their philatelic booths. Macy's, Gimbels, I used to love to go. And going further back in time, the Bowery was the hot spots for stamps. High rents forced out many a dealer, but the passion remains in the city. In fact, we are looking at the rarest stamp in the world, the British Guiana one cent magenta, the only stamp absent from the collection of the British Royal Family, after they missed it at the bidding in the 1920s. A New York businessman took it in the 1920s, and it went to John Eleuthere du Pont some time later. This month, on the 17th, the Queen of England will have a chance to complete her collection, and others with similarly deep pockets will be competing to complete theirs. And they may win. I know at least that I will not, and I content myself with the Guyana 5c stamps of 1966 that has the image of this rarity. Interesting to note that this sought after stamps is both canceled and the low denomination of the set; in collecting, canceled 1p stamps are the scourge of dealers who sometimes throw them out. Or use whole boxes as kindling. And one wonders what happened to the other magentas that were issued. Did they help light a fire somewhere in South America two centuries ago, or are they still knocking around, maybe at the bottom of the cigar box I just acquired? Hope springs eternal. These days I am a topicalist, and if I were into ships - this stamp depicts one - I would be saving my pennies and heading for the auction house. Instead, I will be happy just to view (and blog about it here). My themes are orchids, falconry, bats, bromeliads and cactus - some of which come up on British Guiana (as it was until 26 May, 1966) and Guyana stamps.

The postal history of this country is most interesting, starting with the 'cottonreels' - and then going into more stamps that were produced locally before the printers in London could deliver. 

The world's rarest stamp has a unique history, about which more to come; the nation in which it was produced is still producing collectable issues, as it is small, with a population of one million and an area of  83,000 sq mi. Currently its output is mainly topical (fitting as the early stamps were thus), especially in the realm of orchids, of which it has no less than 500 stamps, including hundreds  with images from Reichenbachia, collected for their beauty. A singular trait with the Guyana Post Office is the making of overprints, and collectors of this country are challenged with an excessive amount of surcharges and overprints that would drive most philatelists to the brink of madness. Recently I purchased the 1990 set of 8 orchids, after spending two years trying to acquire it; each effort I made was met with offers from dealers who had an endless array of overprints (and none recognised in the catalogues) honouring a plethora of famous people; one suspects that an unscrupulous dealer merely overprinted them himself to charge a premium on the set. Glad I was to acquire the set without an overprint, which may prove to be the rare (and only genuine) state. [Scott 2359-66]. And I will cherish them until the day that Sothebys sees fit to auction them too! At least if I do not have the 1c magenta, I have 8 beautiful and long sought after stamps that I genuinely enjoy, one of them being vanilla, which appears on around 100 issues worldwide.

So enough about me and a stamp that none of us will ever own. This blog is about stamps in New York - where to go to get them - posts from NY collectors and dealers - and I hope to bring back some of the feeling that existed in my 1960s childhood. Darryl, Willy, you reading this? If you are, perhaps we crossed paths a dozen times without even knowing it - maybe at the Holiday Inn on 57th Street at the Metropolitan shows, or upstairs at the New Yorker Hotel? Or every weekend at the Chelsea Antiques Market on 25th Street where Terry sells stamps indoors or the outdoor one where a group of Russians and Armenians by the Serbian church between B'way and 6th? Who knows. So a big hi to everone, I'd love to hear from you if you care to leave comments do so - and stay tuned.