Posts Tagged ‘inverted jenny’

Postage stamps are thoroughly used in all parts of the World. Everyday, a huge number of stamps are printed in the World.

The first postage stamp issued in the world was in 1840. The stamp was introduced by the British itself and was called “One Penny Black”. Those postage stamps were integrated or attached and had to be cut with scissors. Printed on it was the picture of England’s Queen Victoria. The unused samples of these stamps are very much rare to find. And if you find one, it is very much expensive to acquire. Although having some of it in their collections means everything to many of stamps enthusiasts.

Other stamp collectors that observe the rise in value of old postage stamps engaged in Philatelic investments. Stamps prove to be the most profitable among other collectibles. Rare postage stamps are investments and also good alternative to art collecting, because they sell fast at a high price and easier to store.

There are eleven most extremely strange and very rare postage stamps in the world today. They are:

1.) The Two Penny Blue Stamps (1840) – these stamps lacked the country’s name. One of the earliest stamps made in Britain.

2.) The ‘Mauritius Post Office Error’ Stamps (1847) – these stamps had the words “Post Office” instead of “Post Paid.”

3.) Hawaii Missionary Stamps (1851) – these are very expensive stamps, an unused set of eight could cost up to $100,000.

4.) British Guiana 1-cent Magenta Stamps (1856) – alleged to be the world’s rarest and most valuable stamps. These stamps were sold at an auction in 1970 for $280,000.

5.) The New Brunswick “Connell’s Folly” (1859) – Postmaster General Charles Connell used his own portrait on the 5 cent stamp, the value most commonly used in the colony.

6.) The Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador “Seebeck Reprints” (1889-1899) – Nicholas F. Seebeck, a representative of the Hamilton Banknote Company in New York, contracted to print stamps for these nations at no charge, provided all unsold stamps were invalidated and returned to him. He sold these and other postage stamps reprinted from the original plates to collectors at a fraction of their face value.

7.) The China “Special Delivery Issue (1913-1914) – It’s the world’s largest stamp, printed in strips with five different designs.

8.) The U.S. “Inverted Airmail” (1918) – Inverted Jenny.

9.) The Germany “Inflation Issue” (1923) – Due to rampant inflation, Germany had to issue stamps at very high values. The stamp valued at 50 million marks represents one of the highest denominations ever to appear on postage stamps. It became one of rare and valuable postage stamps from Germany.

10.) The U.S. “Dag Hammarskjold Error,” (1962) – Two collectors, one in New Jersey and one in Ohio, each bought a sheet of this commemorative, which had the yellow background inverted. On discovering the existence of the error, the Post Office Dept. reissued the stamp with the error and eliminated the premium value of the original sheets.

11.) The U.S. “Farley’s Follies” (1935) – Postmaster General James A. Farley favored selected friends and VIPs, especially President Franklin D. Roosevelt, by giving them ungummed and imperforated sheets of certain commemorative issues. After strong and continued protests from American stamp collectors, the government was forced to reissue the postage stamps in an ungummed and imperforated form and make them available to the general public.

The value of old postage stamps and the rarest of them are becoming higher and higher as the demands from stamp collectors not just from the United Kingdom but from around the world are increasing rapidly.

Famous Stamps can be found in nearly all of the postage systems in the world, and are often over a century old.  To know more information on any stamp issue, browse our articles.

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.