Stamp Airplane Upside Down - "Inverted Jennyes" became famous; as one writer put it, "they blossomed into the Taj Mahal of stamps." National Postal Museum
During his lunch break on May 14, 1918, William T. Robey, a banker at Hibbs and Company in Washington, D.C., went, as he often did, to the post office on New York Avenue. There, he hoped to buy a new stamp to celebrate the launch of the US Post Office, which is set to make its official debut the following day.
Stamp Airplane Upside Down
Marka was an interesting sight. It had a Curtiss JN-4 or "Jenny", the same plane responsible for delivering the next day's mail, and was printed in carmine rose and navy blue. The eye-catching color scheme certainly attracted buyers, but like many of the ardent collectors who flocked to post offices in Philadelphia, New York and the nation's capital, Robey also knew he was opening up a bigger possibility—a misprint. It was the second time the Post Office had attempted a two-tone stamp, and with the enthusiasm of the First World War, careless mistakes were likely to be made.
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Among the many benefactors, Robey was the lucky one. Instead of flying high into the air, Jenny appeared upside down on her seal, as if parachuting for a good performance in the barn. Better luck for Robey, the man who sold him the stamps that fateful day had never seen the bird and couldn't tell the difference. Seeing the mistake, Robbie saw an opportunity and politely asked to buy a sheet of 100 numbers for $24.
He soon sent word of the mistake to his friends and collectors, and it didn't take long for word to reach the postal inspectors, who were eager to return the wrong stamps. Of course, Robey declined their offers and for several days hid the stamp paper under the mattress in the one-bedroom apartment he shared with his wife. Under intense scrutiny, he was eager to close the deal and in a panic sold the stamps to Eugene Klein, a Philadelphia businessman who was an expert on philanthropy, for $15,000.
The money allowed the Robbies to buy a new house as well as a car, which, the story goes, William once drove through the back wall of his garage. It's a sign of a larger flaw in his panic marketing: Robey assumed that many defective stamps would appear because they were usually printed on a large plate of 400 titles, but some errors were caught and destroyed. If only Robey had been patient, he could have done more.
Klein quickly sold the paper to his friend Edward Green and made a large profit from the business. By now, the so-called "reverse Jennys" have become famous. As one author says in his recounting of events, "it blossomed into the Taj Mahal of stamps, the Fort Knox of collecting, the Mona Lisa of timbomania, and the Holy Grail of philately."
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Klein convinced Greene, the son of the infamous and parodic "Wizard of Wall Street," to split the original paper and number the backs of each stamp to record their ownership. Green created one block of eight stamps, seven blocks of four stamps and 64 individual stamps with different perforations depending on their location. Green kept the best examples for himself and sold the rest for between $175 and $250.
As stamp prices continued to rise, Green's remaining stamps became the focus of an incredible philatelic story. At the stamp collectors' club, he allegedly threatened to burn all the stamps with the right tip and was frightened by the fear of his fellow collectors, who begged him to stop. From there, he eventually placed the remaining sharp stamps in a safe to reduce circulation, where they remained until his death in 1936.
When collectors rediscovered the stamps, they were horrified: For years, the Inverted Jennys had been stuck together, perhaps because they had been left out during one of Green's many yachting trips. To remove the stuck-on stamps, the auction house had to use water to remove the gum before separating them with a ruler. One of these non-chewing stamps is on display in the "Gems of American Philately" exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum along with a block of four stamps and two other Inverted Jennys.
And, you may be wondering, what happened to the remaining stamp blocks? Many found their way to wealthy stamp collectors — an anonymous buyer bought one for more than $1 million in September 1989; at a recent auction in New York, a separate store sold for nearly $3 million. The high price is due to several factors, says Daniel Piazza, curator at the Postal Museum.
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"It's the romance of early aviation, it's a wonderful image of an airplane flying up and down, red and white and blue," says Piazza. "There's a lot to do: the end of World War I, the beginning of civil aviation, airmail."
As Piazza points out, stamp collectors don't consider Inverted Jennys extremely rare – 100 stamps is a huge amount in the collecting world. Still, many wanted them, and as with most valuable items, the Jenny Inverted also attracted a lot of criminal interest. The biggest theft, in which a block of four stamps was stolen during a Family Society convention in September 1955, remains unsolved 60 years later, although three of the four stamps have been recovered. Depending on condition, that stamp is worth quite a bit of money – one Jenny Inverted has sold at auction for more than $500,000 in recent years.
Even the post office tried to capitalize on the popularity of Inverted Jennys. In 2013, they reissued the popular stamp, selling them for $2 each. However, in a humorous twist, they decided to deliberately print the stamps upside down – but also produced a sheet of 100 with the plane flying right side up to try to advertise and generate interest among collectors.
But on the surface it looked scientific. Piazza says the plane is painted on Inverted Jenny-number 38262, which flew out of Potomac Park near Washington, D.C. On May 15, 1918, to deliver the first mail — this was attempted by an inexperienced person, who got lost during his journey and had to crash land. When his plane hit soft ground in a rural Maryland field, it flipped over. Art, as is often the case, is life itself. And as Piazza points out, the story continues to fascinate years later because of its sheer improbability.
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"People, when they get to that stamp, they understand easily," he says. "On a very visual level they understand why the brand is valued - they can understand why someone would want to own it."
Daniel Fernandez is an editorial intern at Smithsonian magazine. He is studying journalism and history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
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