When I was a boy, sometimes I’d retreat to the privacy of my bedroom, carefully close the door, and engage in long sessions of quiet, but intense, philately.
In retrospect, it’s hard to understand my youthful devotion to the world of postage stamps. What was it about them that I found so fascinating?
True, some of them were real eye-catchers, especially the ones from tiny island nations like Mauritius, Samoa, and Tuvalu, which pumped out mountains of garish specimens for the export market.
Even back then, I knew there was something absurd about a so-called “nation” that barely boasted a crushed coral landing strip — much less an actual space program — proudly issuing stamps commemorating Apollo-Soyuz or imagining a manned rover mission to Mars.
The island nation stamps were fascinating for their absurd overreach, which smacked of a certain desperation. In fact, the desperate overreach might explain my fascination with them. At the time, I happened to be suffering from a similar pathology.
The real problem with the island stamps was that they weren’t worth anything. My albums were organized by two key criteria: aesthetics and value. The island nation stamps, with their bold designs, large size, and deeply saturated colors, scored big on aesthetics — at least to my ten-year-old eyes — but were big zeroes on the value side. They were literally a dime a dozen.
Even so, a dime a dozen was a pretty good value proposition for my minuscule budget, so for a while I focused on island stamps, which arrived in bulging glassine envelopes on a monthly basis. To satisfy my appetite for big-dollar stamps, I subscribed to the catalogues of the great philatelic auction houses.
It was from these glossy catalogues, with their self-important atmospherics and breathless descriptions, that I learned about rarities like the Graf Zeppelins, muted monochromatic American airmail stamps that were issued in the depths of the Great Depression in denominations of 65 cents, a dollar thirty, and two dollars and sixty cents — in other words, in amounts that exceeded many workers’ daily wages.
The Graf Zeppelins were removed from service in a matter of months, and most of them were destroyed. This radically increased the value of the survivors.
The artwork on these stamps was subtle: moody engravings that featured the great airship hovering over a stormy sea; or stretching across the Atlantic, forming a bridge between the Old World and the New; or, most fanciful of all, orbiting in ethereal clouds beyond planet earth, as if the zeppelin were ferrying its luxe passengers to the afterlife.
Of course, the colors were a little boring: money green; leather brown; pale cyan.
But they were worth a ton!
I mooned over the Graf Zeppelins. I started collecting inexpensive canceled airmail stamps, which dovetailed nicely with another strange obsession of mine: the fighter aircraft of World War I.
Aviation was in its infancy in 1914 when the Great War began, but by the armistice, air power had staked a crucial claim over the modern battlefield. The United States, a relative latecomer to the war, had commissioned thousands of Curtiss JN-4 biplanes, or “Jennies,” as they were known, a nickname that grew out of the “JN” designation. The Jennies were slow and sturdy, which made them ideal for training a new corps of military pilots.
After the war, surplus Jennies were sold off for pennies on the dollar, thus inaugurating the era of the “barnstormer,” as entrepreneurs began to explore domestic uses of the airplane.
The U.S. government was keen to expand domestic aviation, too. In May of 1918, the Postal Service decided to establish regular air deliveries to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City. Brand new “airmail” stamps featuring the Curtiss Jenny were rushed into production.
The new stamps were printed in two passes: a first plate laid down one hundred carmine borders with the words “U.S. Postage” and the denomination, twenty-four cents; a second plate added a dark blue airplane to the center of each stamp.
The finished sheets were rushed to post offices on May 13th. Savvy stamp collectors, aware of the breakneck production schedule — the engraving had only begun on May 3rd — were on the lookout for “inverts,” stamps where the airplanes had been mistakenly printed upside-down.
A lucky collector named William T. Robey was astonished when a sleepy-eyed postal clerk sold him a sheet of 100 inverts — the only inverted Jennies ever to see the light of day.
Most of Robey’s stamps have survived. The value of a single inverted Jenny is now reckoned in the millions of dollars.
So you can imagine how thrilled I was the other day to walk into a post office, plunk down twelve dollars, and walk out with a mint block of six of them!
Of course, my inverted Jennies are reprints. The U.S. Postal Service, which seems to have adopted the posture of a beleaguered island nation, designed them expressly for collectors — even lapsed ones like me.
In an ingenious twist worthy of Willie Wonka, the U.S.P.S. has even issued a handful of “misprinted misprints;” i.e., inverted inverted Jennies. In other words, 100 lucky purchasers will open their sealed envelopes and discover that the Jennies on their commemorative stamps are actually right-side up!
When those super-rare right-side-up Jennies surface, they’ll be worth some serious coin. But they’ll just look like ordinary stamps, not government-issued screw-ups, which is the whole point of an inverted Jenny.
In other words: a high score for value, but a low one for aesthetics…
