World’s most valuable postage stamp falls short of anticipated auction record– despite great expectations.
The following written content by Neda Ulaby
Despite great expectations, the British Guiana One-Cent Black on Magenta stamp got licked in a much anticipated auction this morning.
Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum
The diminutive wisp of paper was expected to set a new world record for a single stamp sale at auction. Instead, bidding closed at $8,307,0oo—not pocket change by any means, but considerably short of its previous winning bid, $9.5 million, to say nothing of the $10-$15 million the stamp was expected to fetch today.
Even so, the stamp remains by weight one of the most highly valued items on the planet. “To philatelists, it’s a really big deal, since it’s the only copy of this stamp that has survived since 1856,” says Daniel Piazza, chief curator of philately at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Postal Museum. (Philately = a fancy word for loving and studying stamps.) The dark red, octagonal British Guiana One-Cent Magenta is often called “the Mona Lisa of the stamp world.” But Piazza admits, “it’s fairly unremarkable looking.”
Murky in hue and scribbled upon by a colonial postal worker and former owners, the stamp disappointed some visitors to the museum when it was displayed there a few years ago. “I would say a common reaction was – ‘this doesn’t look right,’ ” Piazza remembers. “Well, that’s because you’ve been looking at magazine [reproductions] for 40 years.”
Rarely was the stamp seen in public for much of its existence until it was purchased by footwear magnate Stuart Weitzman in 2014, who allowed it to be exhibited for years.
“Blemished, battered and cut, the “British Guiana One-Cent Black on Magenta” is a stamp with a twisty tale to tell, one that begins in the hands of a young Scottish boy and passes through the hands of a killer,” wrote my colleague Laurel Dalrymple in 2014, when Weitzman bought it for $9.5 million.
“The stamp was printed just 16 years after the introduction of postage stamps,” she continued. “The postmaster in British Guiana (now Guyana), facing a stamp shortage, asked the colony’s newspaper to print an emergency supply while awaiting a shipment of stamps from London. Read more from NPR.
