Inverted Jenny
The 24 cent Jenny Stamp was created for delivery of mail by air – a new concept in 1918. This is a large sum compared to the 3 cents that it costs for ground delivery.
The Jenny Stamps were printed in sheets of 100, but each sheet had to be fed through the printing machine twice. Therefore, it’s very easy to accidently flip the sheet on the second pass, and this is exactly what happened. The 24c airmails are red and blue, and on the invert stamps the airplane in the middle of the stamp’s design is upside down. One of these sheets were printed with the jenny plane upside down, and sold before it was noticed, creating the Inverted Jenny error.
W.T. Robey, a collector in Washington, D.C., Purchased a sheet of 100 of these stamps at the post office for $24 on their first day of issue on May 14th, 1918. One week later he sold them for $15,000. The buyer was Eugene Klein, a stamp dealer in Philadelphia. Within days, multi-millionaire Colonel Edward (Ned) Green, son of Hetty (the “Witch of Wall Street”) Green, pays Klein $20,000 for the 100 Jenny Inverts. Green Separated the sheet into blocks of four and single stamps to be sold individually. April, 1982 – A single Inverted Jenny sells for $198,000. September, 1991 – Unique Jenny Invert plate block sells for 1.2 million dollars to broadcast executive. And in 2005 Jenny Invert block sold for $2.97 million. The single stamp of “Inverted Jenny” stamp was sold for $825,000.
Recently this mistakenly printed with an illustration of an upside down plane has been sold for £184,000 at auction in Warwick & Warwick.
Read also
