James Barron - The One-Cent Magenta: Inside the Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World

Published in Australia by Affirm Press in 2017
28 Thistlethwaite Street, South Melbourne, VIC 3205.
www.affirmpress.com.au

First published in 2017 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-222 a division
of Workman Publishing, 225 Varick Street New York, New York 10014

Text and copyright James Barron, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher. Not for sale outside of Australia and New Zealand.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication
entry available for this title.
Title: The One-Cent Magenta / James Barron, author.
ISBN: 9781925584059 (paperback)

Cover design by Alissa Dinallo
Photograph of The One-Cent Magenta stamp on cover courtesy of
Sothebys, Inc. 2014
Typeset in Granjon 11.5/16

About the Author

James Barron is a reporter for the New York Times , where his writing has appeared in virtually every section of the paper. He is the author of Piano: The Making of a Stein way Concert Grand , and he also edited The New York Times Book of New York. He lives in New York City.

Once again
to
Jane

CONTENTS

ONE

Stamp World

M y improbable descent into Stamp World started at a cocktail party that had nothing to do with stamps.

It was in one of those Stanford White private clubs in New York City that was built at a cost of something like a million-plus in the days when something like a million-plus was real money. This was a party for a first- time author whose murder mystery had just been published. He is the younger brother of someone I went to college with. Their father is an author. Their mother was an author. The guy from college published a book that won an award. The brother, a Wall Street type Id never met, had finally done what everyone else in the family had been doing for years.

What a place for a book party. The Palladian arch just past the front door that you had to walk underperfectly proportioned. The black-and-white checkerboard floor in the lobby that you had to walk acrossimmense. The larger-than-life portrait of none other than J.P. Morgan did I pass him on the way up the marble staircase, or just imagine it?

The party itself was in a basketball-court-size room on the second floor. The ceiling danced with cherubs or horses or celestial who-knows-what. I was earlymy college classmate hadnt arrived yetso I marched across the antique carpet to the only person I recognized.

David! I said. What are you up to now?

It no doubt sounded like, What have you done for me lately, because that was exactly what I meantand he knew it. David N. Redden always has something in the works with the makings of a feature for a newspaper reporter like me. I had written about him before. Little did I know what another round of journalistic recidivism would lead to.

Redden answered by saying that he was about to sell an old postage stamp, but some stamp collectors in London might want to dip it in benzene, and that would be a problem.

He was not talking about just any old postage stamp. Redden never dealt with just any old thing. He trafficked in superlativesthe rarest this, the most expensive that. He was an auctioneer at Sothebys. He had sold everything from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassiss belongings to a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil. He had sold the Duke and Duchess of Windsors furniture, and one of the pianos from the movie Casablanca . There were two. Of all the pianos from all the gin joints in all the towns in the world, this one went for $602,500.

He also sold the first book printed in North America, for $14 million. Twice he sold the same copy of the Declaration of Independence, one of twenty-five from a batch printed in July 1776. The second time, in 2000, it went for $7.4 million; the first time, in 1991, for $2.2 million. That sounds like an impressive profit until you learn that, before that first auction, it had changed hands for $4 at a flea market. The buyer didnt even know he was getting it. It was hidden behind a second-rate painting in an undistinguished frame.

Redden told me that his latest rarity was the one-cent magenta from British Guiana. He read the blank look on my face and all but rolled his eyes, as if to say, How could you not know about the one-cent magenta from British Guiana? He insisted that every schoolboy knows about the one-cent magenta from British Guiana: quite simply, he announced, exuberantly, the rarest stamp in the world. He predicted that it would become the most expensive stamp in the world when he sold it in a couple of months.

I would soon learn that the one-cent magenta was issued in 1856, and that until the mass suicide of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple followers in 1978, it was what the country now called Guyana was known for. This tiny thing was certainly its most famous single export.

That was my introduction to Stamp World, an arcane parallel universe peopled by collectors who are crazed and crazy, obsessed and obsessive. Stamp World exists for something thats practically obsoletewho sends old-fashioned mail when you can post and share on Face-book, Twitter, and Instagram? In our instant-message, Snapchat age, stamps are untrendy and unchic (and unneeded, thanks to scannable barcodes). Stamps are what they have always been: quiet, orderly, proper. And its certainly true that some stamp collectors are stuffy, stiff-upper-lip typesa high-energy, high-testosterone bunch they are not. Get ready to freak out, stamp collectors (or, you know, get as excited as you ever get), Time magazine joked in reporting the sale of the one-cent magenta in 2014, after, as Redden had forecast, it became the most expensive stamp in the world. The Globe and Mail of Toronto made stamp collecting sound less like a hobby and more like a hang-up. Stamp collectors, it said, inhabit a fetishistic underworld with little bits of printed paper [that] people licked.

Yes. Well. Welcome to Stamp World.

Stamp World has its celebrities. John Lennons boyhood stamp album can be seen at the National Postal Museum in Washington. Freddie Mercury of the British rock band Queen was a stamp collector, as was the violinist Jascha Heifetz. The aviator Amelia Earhart, the novelist James Michener, the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau, and the actor Bela Lugosi, of Dracula famestamp collectors all. The tennis star Maria Sharapova is one, too, but she did not sound happy when it became known. Everyones calling me a dork now, she said. I mean, its just a hobby.

Stamp World delights in catching mistakes: stamps with three horses but only eleven legs, or three men with only five legs. Or the collector on a commemorative stamp honoring stamp collectors who has six fingers on one hand. Or a stamp with a woman and a bald eagle. Its a patriotic imageNeoclassical, even. Shes naked. But what gets their attention in Stamp World is that one of her feet has only four toes.