World’s most valuable stamp triples price in 10 years

Press, 7 April 1980, Page 6

World’s most valuable stamp triples price in 10 years

By

CAREY WINFREY,

. of

the “New York Times”

’ . New York The world’s most valuable stamp — a crudely 'printed, magenta-coloured octagon — has been sold at auction for $907,000 to an anonymous collector. It was the highest price ever paid for a postage stamp. L”:.’-.-L ’ . The stamp was the British Guiana 1856 one Cent, a one-of-a-kind rarity that .' has often been the most valuable object in the world for its size and weight. The seller was Irwin Weindberg of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a professional’rare-post-age stamp dealer and investor. He was acting for . a nine-member syndicate that paid $299,000 for the stamp at the same Siegel Galleries’ annual auction 10 years ago. That figure’ stood unchallenged as "a record for a single stamp until Friday. At the time of the 1970 sale, Mr Weindberg described the syndicate, of which he was the main partner, as “sophisticated businessmen who want to protect themselves against inflation,” . “Our plan "was ■ a 10-year plan for; this particular, stamp,” he said yesterday. “Well,” he added, “the inflation is here and it’s just about 10 years to the day.” The . little piece of smudged paper known simply -as-'the British; -Guiana, boastsit a, colourful history

that has added to its glamour as’well asdts value. It was 1856 in the colony of British Guiana, on the Atlantic coast of South America, now independent Guyana, and a fresh supply of stamps ordered from London had failed to-arrive. To tide him Over . the postmaster ordered a local printer to produce, a. fetvj-dozen provisional stamps "in four, cent arid one' cent denominations', using a- design approximating the'■seal of the colony, featuring a\ ship and the Latin mottqJ“Damus petimus que vicissjm,?’-, &r “We give and seek in turn.”

Wary of forgery, the postmaster directed that allLOf the-provisional stamps were, to be initialed by one -of four postal officials. The stamp sold last week bears the initials- “E.D.W.,” for. E. D. Wight, an assistant postmaster. It also bears the postmarked “Demerara, April 4/ 1856.” Demerara, now Georgetown, was the capital of British Guiana. For almost 20 years, all of the , one-cent provisionals were lost. But in 1873, Vernon Vaughan, a Demerara teenager arid stamp collector, came across a single one-cent stamp on a family letter in an attic trunk. Ths

young man sold it for about $640. , The stamp next passed to the then world’s leading stamp collector, Count Phillippe la Renotier von Ferrary, an Italian-Austrian nobleman who lived in Paris and routinely allocated $10,700 a week toward 'the enrichment of his collection. When the count died in 1916, while visiting the Netherlands, the French Government seized his collection and-ordered it sold at a series of public auctions for German war reparations. It was at one of these auctions that Arthur Hind, a millionaire manufacturer of plush • -from Utica, New York, bought the stamp for about $35,000, reportedly Outbidding ait agent for King George V. ' »Upon Hind’s death, in 1933, the stamp appeared to W’fTost. Executors pored worriedly over his collectfort. the stamp subsequently turned up in his desk,, where he -had apparently tossed it; in the same that carried it back from an exhibition abroad. After Hind’s widow established her • ownership, of the stamp in a court action, she arranged for its private sale — reportedly for about $53,000 to an' anonymous! Australian collector in 1940. It was this anonymous collector who offered it for sale a decade ago, enabling Weindberg to add his name ts:4rthe select <list of its owners.