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

Sotheby’s, 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

TWO

TRAVELS WITH DAVID

THREE

ONE CENT

1856: Printed, Sold, and Forgotten

FOUR

Six Shillings

1873: Found by a Twelve-Year-Old

FIVE

£120

1878: Glasgow and London

SIX

£150

1878: The Man in the Yachting Cap

SEVEN

$32,500

1922: The Plutocrat with the Cigar

EIGHT

$40,000

1940: The Angry Widow, Macy’s, and the Other Plutocrat

NINE

$286,000

1970: The Wilkes-Barre Eight

TEN

$935,000

1980: ‘The Man Showed Up’

ELEVEN

$9.5 MILLION

2014: ‘I Expected to See Magenta, and I Saw Magenta’

Acknowledgments

Notes

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 I’d 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 under—perfectly proportioned. The black-and-white checkerboard floor in the lobby that you had to walk across—immense. 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 early—my college classmate hadn’t arrived yet—so 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 meant—and 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 superlatives—the rarest this, the most expensive that. He was an auctioneer at Sotheby’s. He had sold everything from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s belongings to a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil. He had sold the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s 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 didn’t 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 that’s practically obsolete—who 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 it’s certainly true that some stamp collectors are stuffy, stiff-upper-lip types—a 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 Lennon’s 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 fame—stamp collectors all. The tennis star Maria Sharapova is one, too, but she did not sound happy when it became known. “Everyone’s calling me a dork now,” she said. “I mean, it’s 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. It’s a patriotic image—Neoclassical, even. She’s naked. But what gets their attention in Stamp World is that one of her feet has only four toes.

That stamp collectors are known as philatelists does not help. Smithsonian magazine’s website peppered an article about the etymology of that word with lines like, “Get your mind out of the gutter.” Fowler’s Modern English Usage kept a straight face but lamented that stamp collecting had been burdened with an esoteric-sounding, difficult-to-pronounce term: “It is a pity that for one of the most popular … pursuits, one of the least popularly intelligible names should have been found,” adding that the word is “irksome to most of our ears.”

A dictionary dive only deepened the frustration. I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary, which has a stake in all this because its first editor was a philatelist as well as a philologist. The entry for philatelist appears, tellingly, after philargyry, a love of money, and before philautia, a love of oneself.

Some psychoanalysts might insist that philatelists cannot live without one and are driven by the other. And some philatelists love the Post Office much too much. W. Reginald Bray, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century British eccentric, was gleefully enamored of the Post Office. But, as his biographer John Tingey noted, the people at the Post Office were probably less enamored of him, considering the trouble he put them through. He mailed himself. Not once but twice. The first time, he stuck a stamp on his head. The second time, he splurged and sent himself home by registered mail. Bray’s house wasn’t far from the local post office—the postage was less than a taxi ride would have cost. A bicycle messenger was assigned to deliver him. The messenger happily exacted some revenge. He walked to Bray’s house after putting Bray on the bike and telling him to start pedaling.

In Stamp World, I would learn that the one-cent magenta is an accidental icon. It was not supposed to be so special. It was an improvisation, a quick-and-smudgy solution in a nineteenth-century British colony that dispensed stamps printed in London. But sometimes, your ship doesn’t come in. When a shipment of 100,000 stamps did not arrive at the dock as scheduled, the local postmaster in British Guiana commissioned a local newspaper to print “provisional” stamps in two denominations. The four-cent stamps were for letters. The one-cent stamps were for periodicals like the newspaper itself. Nobody knows how many were printed, but they only needed enough stamps to last until the next boat arrived with the real thing.

To some collectors, the one-cent magenta is the Mona Lisa of stamps, but its face has no face, just a workmanlike image of a schooner and a Latin motto that is usually translated as, “We give and we take in return.” Until Redden sent it on a pre-auction tour of libraries and museums a couple of months before the cocktail party, it had not been seen in public since the mid-1980s. It had not been displayed outside of a stamp show since the New York World’s Fair in 1940, when it arrived in an armored car, a clever promotional gimmick that a later owner would copy. Once it disappeared at a collectors’ convention. Detectives issued all-points bulletins and wondered which philatelic Houdini had made off with it. But it had not been stolen. It had slipped from its mooring and gone on the shortest of trips, drifting for a moment before putting in at the bottom of its own display case.

For all the fuss, the one-cent magenta is not much to look at. In the 1990s, the editor of American Philatelist magazine called it the ugliest stamp he had ever seen. That was fifty years after the writer Alvin F. Harlow described it as “a shoddy-looking thing.” Another stamp writer mentioned it, but not in his chapter titled “The Postage Stamp as a Work of Art.” In the 1960s, L.N. and Maurice Williams, two brothers from Britain who wrote more than thirty books about stamps and stamp collecting, said it was “unsatisfactory to the aesthete.”

It is no more satisfactory now. When the one-cent magenta went on display at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in 2015, Smithsonian magazine’s website, bravely telling it like it is, reported that seeing the one-cent magenta in person was “a bit like looking at a red-wine stain or a receipt that’s been through the wash a few times.” The corners of the one-cent magenta have been clipped off, and it tricks your eye at first glance: Is it square? No. It’s three millimeters wider than it is tall, such a slight difference that you have to squint to be certain (and look up the dimensions, just to be sure).

Would anyone in British Guiana have imagined that anyone would ever sit around trying to figure out how many one-cent magentas it would take to cover the real Mona Lisa? I did some math. Depending on whose measurements I used, the answer was between 520 and 600, more one-cent magentas than probably ever existed. Five hundred forty-one little stamps would not add much heft to the Mona Lisa’s canvas, and at a championship weigh-in, the single one-cent magenta would barely register on the scale. A breeze would carry it off. A breath the strength of a happy-birthday candle blowout would send it soaring (and its handlers panicking, as they did at that stamp show).

But the one-cent magenta has a complexion problem. It’s not really ruby or bordello red. I saw it when it was waiting in the wings before Redden sold it, and it was the dull color of dried blood at a crime scene. And then, when it was carried into the spotlight, its red deepened—it’s a chameleon, changing in new surroundings.

So what color is it? I called color experts who can tell what shade of white the White House is. Frank H. Mahnke, the president of the International Association of Color Consultants/Designers’ executive committee, told me it was a mixture of red and purple.

That is why he did what he did. He could see something in the one-cent magenta that I did not.

I printed a picture of the one-cent magenta and took it to a paint store down the block from where I live. There I asked a color consultant named Ferne Maibrunn to find the color closest to the one-cent’s magenta. From among the thousands of paint strips in little holders on the walls, she picked out a shade called “Chili Pepper” after rejecting “Rosy Blush” as too pink.

She asked how the stamp had been printed. By then, I was deep enough in Stamp World to answer, “Amateurishly.” I told her that the font was ordinary, the ink unevenly applied.

I had learned that, like the Mona Lisa, the one-cent magenta has its mysteries. Was it always that color, or was it colorized later in life, like an MGM movie? And the back of the stamp is a mystery all its own. It is reddish pink—not the magenta of the front, but not the usual creamy white you find on the reverse side of a stamp. It carries the markings of past owners, a custom in philately. Some signed their initials. But how did it get the unusual-looking wheel-like star on the back?

And if that’s not enough to sustain a whodunit, there is the biggest mystery of all: Several hundred one-cent magentas must have come off the press, probably in sheets with four stamps on each page, so why haven’t any others turned up? Where was the one-cent magenta for the first sixteen years after it was issued? David Redden understood the importance of raising questions like these, even if he couldn’t answer them before the auction, or ever. But to create interest, he had to play detective as well as salesman.

Unlike the famous Inverted Jenny—the 1918 stamp that was mistakenly printed with a biplane upside down— the one-cent magenta is not just rare, it is unique. There are a hundred Inverted Jennies. There is only one one-cent magenta. Lately it has changed hands only once in a generation, leaving some who had the means to buy it—but whose timing was off—panting at the lack of an opportunity to part with their cash. For most of its life, it remained safely out of sight, locked in bank vaults or on a shelf in the palace that is now the official residence of the prime minister of France. Once it got out of British Guiana, it did not go slumming.

It had a presence, a personality. One owner called it the “big baby.” Another referred to it by a more romantic-sounding term, the “magenta lady.” Redden, while not an owner, possessed it for a while—on consignment, of course. As its custodian, he thought about how it affected those who did own it, even as he himself became the latest character in the life of this stamp, and there had been some characters. Among them was its last owner, John E. du Pont, who, besides being an heir to the chemical fortune, was a collector’s collector. Long before he bought the one-cent magenta, he had amassed sixty million shells, two million birds, and thousands of stamps. He once slept with the one-cent magenta under his pillow in a hotel when the staff could not open the safe for him. He even paid a broker who dealt in such things to put his picture on a stamp from Redonda, a “micro-nation” in the Caribbean, really an uninhabited island that was named by Christopher Columbus in 1493 and later mined for fertilizer.

Intriguing as they were, those details about du Pont were largely forgotten when he died in 2010. Most of the obituaries about him began by saying he had shot a famous wrestler—Dave Schultz, an Olympic gold medalist who had lived and trained on du Pont’s Pennsylvania estate—and was serving a thirty-year sentence for third-degree murder. The obituaries did not report that two hours before the shooting, he was in a stamp store, shopping. I talked to the sales clerk who waited on him—who assumed, when he heard there was trouble at du Pont’s estate, that du Pont was the victim, not the gunman. Nor did the stories about his death say that he had tried to use the one-cent magenta as his get-out-of-jail card, offering it to the National Postal Museum in return for a pardon. (“I said, ‘How can I get him a pardon? He’s in jail for life,’” the museum’s director, Allen R. Kane, told me.)

Before du Pont, the owner of the one-cent magenta was a man who traveled with the stamp in a briefcase he handcuffed to his wrist.

Before him was the upholstery and seat-cover manufacturer with wife trouble. She deprived him of his final wish, which was to deprive her of the one-cent magenta. But Arthur Hind left behind the one anecdote about the one-cent magenta that everybody remembers. Later, deep in Stamp World, I would read the original version in the yellowing pages of a long-defunct stamp magazine that published an anonymous letter accusing Hind of buying a second one-cent magenta for one reason—to destroy it, preserving the uniqueness of his stamp. But there wasn’t much in the letter that Redden left out when he told it at the cocktail party.

“According to the story,” Redden said, “he lit a cigar and used the same match to light the stamp and burn it. Part of the delight of the story is the cigar and the plutocrat. The image that creates in one’s mind is indelible. Nobody knows if it’s true.”

Redden also told me at the cocktail party that he wanted to have this one-cent magenta “expertized” in London. Redden is the son of an American diplomat and spent much of his childhood in London, and he pronounced it the British way, or so I assumed—“exper-teased.” But there was, um, a negotiation. He said this with an inflection that conveyed the notion of “a problem.”

And then he said the negotiation was about the benzene.

I laughed.

Benzene—the word, not the chemical itself—was a madeleine. Almost any mention of benzene that hasn’t exploded and hurt or killed somebody brings back a memory of the apartment I lived in when I was a year out of college. It was a find: spacious, distinctive, and almost affordable, and the brownstone next door belonged to a man with a thunderous Orson Welles—like voice. He said that when he was in the OSS in World War II and assigned to drive the magazine publisher Henry Luce around, he had made up the answers to every question Luce asked—and that, in time, every made-up answer appeared in Time.

That left me wondering what to believe when he began insisting that my landlord was storing benzene in the basement in a fifty-five gallon drum. Whenever we ran into each other, the neighbor would talk about the benzene in the basement and how it was going to blow us all up. Sometimes, after a particularly dramatic pause, he would whisper, “To smithereens.” He had Welles’ profundity, Welles’s gravitas, and in my mind, “benzene” became the takeaway, the “Rosebud” of West Seventy-fifth Street.

Nobody really keeps benzene in the basement, right? But there are alligators in the sewers, aren’t there? Why not benzene in the basement?

Hearing Redden say “benzene” took me back not to childhood, as “Rosebud” did for Charles Foster Kane, but to that moment of absurdity in my early twenties—and, inevitably, to other memories from those days, when, it seemed, you could still keep track of the world in time-honored ways. It was a world with newspapers, though not as many as there once were, and television networks, though not as many as there soon would be. And it was still a world with old-fashioned stamps.

But now “benzene” was carrying me to a new place, Stamp World. Redden’s mention of benzene would send me hunting down the story of the one-cent magenta— and the resourcefulness of the local postmaster who commissioned it, the charming boyhood dreams of the men who chased after it, and the fulfillment, as adults, for the few who owned it, including du Pont, who bought it sixteen years before he shot Dave Schultz.

Redden didn’t see anything funny about my benzene story. Of course he didn’t. He was preoccupied with getting what he wanted, a certificate from the Royal Philatelic Society London attesting to the stamp’s authenticity. The Royal, as it is known, is the world’s foremost body of stamp collectors. On questions of whether a stamp is what it appears to be, the Royal has had the final say for generations. It was the Royal that had vouched for the one-cent magenta in the 1930s. And, in the 1990s, when another one-cent magenta was discovered in Romania, it was the Royal that declared the second one-cent magenta to be bogus.

For Redden, the issue was whether officials of the Royal would insist on dunking the one-cent magenta in benzene, which, he said, stamp collectors sometimes do when they want to check the paper on which a stamp was printed. A benzene bath, really little more than a dip in a few drops of the stuff, would show more than watermarks on the paper that are hard to see any other way. If a stamp had been tampered with, the ink would run and the fake markings would disappear. The risk of dipping a one-of-a-kind stamp in what is basically lighter fluid is that, authentic or not, it could be destroyed. Dunk. Poof. No more stamp.

It was not a risk Redden could afford. Not if he was to sell the stamp for at least $10 million.

TWO

TRAVELS WITH DAVID

D avid Redden is a master of the aristocratic soft sell, urbane and airily entertaining in his pinstripe suits, shuttling between potential sellers and potential buyers, operating quietly, stoking interest. He arranged the Magna Carta auction so quietly that Sotheby’s did not tell its own employees why it was rescheduling other auctions. James Zemaitis, the director of Sotheby’s 20th-century design department, was asked to give up a room at Sotheby’s headquarters that he had reserved for a pre-auction exhibition of his own. “All they told me was: ‘David Redden is selling this really important document, the most important document of all. Can you give up this room for us?’” he recalled. “‘And I’m like, ‘Sure, but what is he selling, the Magna Carta?’”

Redden was thrilled to be selling the one-cent magenta. “I was born a collector,” he said in a voice that masks ambition, determination, and, sometimes, the extreme patience needed to convince the owners of some rare object to part with it. He told me that he spent years courting the elders of the Boston church that owned the Bay Psalm Book, the first bound volume printed in the North American colonies. In 2013 it became the most expensive book ever sold at auction, when he gaveled down a bid of $14.165 million (equivalent to $14.4 million today).

How much effort he had to put into corralling the one-cent magenta is unclear. Redden said he approached Taras M. Wochok, John E. du Pont’s lawyer, who was charged with selling du Pont’s holdings after he died in prison. Redden told me that he pursued the one-cent magenta because of the emotional pull. He had collected stamps when he was a boy.

When I told Wochok about that, he said flatly, “We called him.”

Later I would also learn that no one uses benzene in authenticating stamps anymore. And that every schoolboy does not know about the stamp he was pursuing.

That pursuit took Redden to Pennsylvania to inspect the one-cent magenta in the bank vault where it had lain during du Pont’s years in prison—and take it away, on consignment. It was mounted on an album page. Redden realized how unlikely the scene was: five or six people— Redden, Wochok, a couple of bank employees, and a couple of assistants—were hunched over a dot of paper, the rarest stamp in the world. Redden told me later that he had been “terrified of damaging it in some way” as he prepared a condition report, a routine auction-house document describing an item that was anything but routine. “You’re looking at a tiny, tiny slip of paper which is worth millions of dollars with the obvious concern that any little scratch or nick is highly consequential,” Redden said.

Gently, Redden put the stamp in a box that he had brought along, and put the box in his briefcase. He walked out of the bank and climbed into a car-service car that drove him to the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, where he boarded a train for New York, accompanied by a security guard.

Redden went to London a few weeks later for one reason. He wanted a piece of paper about the piece of paper in his briefcase—the one-cent magenta. He got the piece of paper he wanted in an afternoon, far faster than anyone thought he would. What it said, though, was more than he wanted. With its careful language, that piece of paper would put experts on one side of the Atlantic at odds with experts on the other—and cause headaches for Redden later on.

Redden traveled light, as he usually does. He carried nothing more than his briefcase and a small suitcase with a change of clothes. At John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, he stowed the briefcase above his seat and settled in. A couple of hours later, as the plane bucked against the late-winter wind above the North Atlantic, he realized that the in-flight movie was about an elaborate caper to steal $20 million—Ridley Scott’s thriller The Counselor, about a corrupt Texas lawyer and a drug cartel. Redden chuckled at the thought that, right there on the plane, he had something in his briefcase that could be worth that much.

Only one other person on the plane knew that: the taciturn guy in the seat across the aisle, the security guard Sotheby’s had hired to safeguard the stamp (as well as Redden).

The nine people with the power to issue the piece of paper Redden wanted were eager to see the one-cent magenta, if only to be able to say they had examined something that had been out of view for so long. These nine people were the Expert Committee of the Royal Philatelic Society London, a best-of-the-best group that gathers about nine times a year to pass judgment on stamps. The Royal traces its roots to a stamp group founded in 1869 and is a peculiarly British institution; both eccentricity and good manners are the norm in its corridors. The Royal’s library is a haven for active-duty research. Some of the books on its shelves are scarcer than a rare stamp. It has writing tables and dark wood, and as they enter, visitors might suspect that they are crossing the threshold of a private club.

But the Royal’s members know that appearances could backfire on them. They know that an outsider could see them as cantankerous, wacky, and quaint types with bad teeth whose lives are invested in obscure books like Swaziland Philately to 1968 or Sudan: The Postal Markings, 1867—1970. They know how lucky they were that Monty Python’s Flying Circus did not mock the Royal the way it mocked so much else in British life.

Perhaps that is why the Royal had a “mission statement” that read, “We may be venerable … but we are not stuffy.” Still, the Royal’s history is formidable. Its president from 1896 to 1910 was the Duke of York (who was also the Prince of Wales from 1901 on). The historian David Can-nadine writes that the Duke of York had been pointed toward philately when he was in his thirties by his uncle, the Duke of Edinburgh, who sold his own stamp collection to his brother, who was the Prince of Wales at the time and was known in the royal family as “Bertie.” And Bertie passed the stamps along to his son, the Duke of York. Another biographer, John Gore, wrote that “it was in this hobby that he found the most effective means” of escape from World War I. He was serious about philately and serious about not being disturbed while he was tending to his stamps. “For some thirty years or more, whenever in London he devoted around three afternoons a week to his collection,” according to a monograph from the Royal Philatelic Collection. He “is said to have been interrupted by his page on only two or three occasions.”

He was the royal who was a regular at the Royal. He attended the society’s meetings and once read a paper on “postal issues of the United Kingdom during the present reign,” the reign at that moment being Bertie’s, who was King Edward VII. The society reported that he “showed a most interesting and valuable display of essays, proofs and specimens.”

He relinquished his position with the Royal to take on a somewhat larger one, as King George V, but his passion for stamps did not diminish with his ascension to the throne. The biographer Kenneth Rose wrote that “courtiers … were pressed into service” to track down stamps and send them back to London. Rose quoted a note from one royal attendant to another: “The King is delighted to hear that you are endeavouring to pinch as many stamps for him as you can during your travels.” During World War I, a young diplomat named Harold Nicolson was assigned to obtain a rare batch of stamps on which the word “Levant” had been misprinted. Nicolson—who was elected to the House of Commons after quitting the Foreign Office and who later proved to be a prolific author, turning out everything from political disquisitions to murder mysteries—thought that he (and the king) had more important things to do while the Tommies were in the trenches. Nicolson dismissed stamps as “mere scraps of paper” and complained in his Diaries and Letters, published in the mid-1960s, that for years “George V did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.”

One young diplomat even worried that stamps could kill the king. After a case of smallpox was reported in a Mideast printing plant, Rose wrote that the anxious attaché was scared that “the royal tongue might be contaminated,” presumably if George V licked the stamps, which he was unlikely to do. Still, the diplomat “assiduously boiled his entire offering of four hundred stamps in a saucepan” before sending them to London. Reading about the episode when I was deep in Stamp World, I imagined the diplomat reciting the witches’ chant from Macbeth. But he probably landed in hot water himself, if only briefly. Sterilizing stamps in a stove-top cauldron would be as destructive as the benzene dip that would so trouble Redden in 2014.

While still the Duke of York, the would-be king had acquired the penny and two-pence Post Office Mauritius stamps of 1847, the first stamps issued by a colonial post office. That fact is often mentioned in the same breath as a delightful anecdote as dubious as the one about Arthur Hind and the cigar: The Duke was asked if he had heard that “some damned fool” had paid £1,400 for one of those stamps. “Yes,” he said. “I was that damned fool.”

The Royal celebrated King George’s jubilee in 1935 as only it could, with an exhibition of seven hundred pages of rarities assembled by ninety of its members. The Royal still enthusiastically describes it as “the greatest gathering of rare material of the British Empire to be shown together in a single exhibition.”

For all the pride the members radiated as they hung their pages on the Royal’s display boards and all the pomp and pageantry that went with the king’s tour, there was one stamp that he did not see: the one-cent magenta. It would not arrive until several months after his death, and then only for the same kind of validation that Redden would seek nearly eighty years later. Indeed, it was the Expert Committee’s verdict in the fall of 1935 that set the stage for the stamp’s return, in Redden’s briefcase, in the spring of 2014.

One person on the Expert Committee in 1935 had examined the one-cent magenta decades earlier, before the Expert Committee had even been established. The British philatelic pioneer Sir Edward Denny Bacon had confirmed the stamp’s one-of-a-kind status in 1891. That would complicate the Expert Committee’s work later on, because anyone who questioned the stamp’s authenticity would be questioning the authority of one of the Royal’s most respected members.

Bacon had a nose for forgeries. He had been so troubled by the proliferation of fake stamps in the 1890s that he had proposed setting up the Expert Committee to decide what was real and what was not. He even made the use of technology, such as it was in the late nineteenth century, a part of the Expert Committee’s mandate, directing the committee to photograph each and every specimen it analyzed.

But the one-cent magenta was not photographed in 1891 because it didn’t officially go before the committee. Bacon saw it in Paris, where it resided at the time. The question was whether it was genuine. “Doubts have more than once been expressed about the ‘face’ value of this stamp,” Sir Edward wrote, “but after a most careful inspection, I have no hesitation whatever in pronouncing it a thoroughly genuine specimen.” But in the next sentence of his account, Sir Edward created a problem for later Expert Committees: he recorded that it was “somewhat rubbed,” which left open the possibility that it had been altered. That possibility would plague the stamp for generations. Even after World War II, the collector Maurice Burrus argued that the one-cent magenta had been created from a somewhat less rare four-cent stamp. In other words, someone had “doctored” the stamp.”

Sir Edward, though, was adamant: “This was never done,” he declared.

There is no way to know what Sir Edward himself believed was the cause of the “rubbing”—he didn’t say—but in 1935, Sir John Wilson was well aware of Burrus’s claim and “took extreme precautions in vetting the specimen.” He had it photographed by Colonel W.R. Mansfield, another stalwart of the Royal. Wilson wrote that he “warned Colonel Mansfield of the suggestion that the ‘FOUR CENTS’ label could have been altered, and [Mansfield] was very definitely of the opinion that no such thing had been done.” Wilson reached the same conclusion after a close look at the little stamp: “[T]he magenta-surface paper of British Guiana is material extremely difficult to handle from the faker’s point of view,” he wrote, “and it is quite impossible to take out a letter, alter two more, take out another letter and, what Monsieur Burrus seems to have forgotten, the full point after it, without creating tremendous abrasion of the surface which should readily be observed by any trained eye[.]” The stamp had to be the real thing.

Redden was determined to have the Expert Committee repeat that finding.

First, though, he took the stamp to the one place in London that mattered more than the Royal: a room in St. James’s Palace, built by Henry VIII as he was breaking with the Roman Catholic Church and establishing a more flexible alternative so he could divorce and remarry as he pleased. Inside St. James’s, over two fireplaces, are the initials ‘HA,’ for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. This is where she spent the night of her coronation.

Prince Charles (the Prince of Wales) and the Duchess of Cornwall (the former Camilla Parker Bowles) live within the grounds of St. James’s. Its Chapel Royal is where Prince William paid his last respects to his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997, and where William’s son, Prince George, was baptized in 2013. And that’s only the recent history.

But St. James’s is considered a “working palace,” with offices for the Royal Household. The Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps works there (and the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom is, officially, the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s). The Yeomen of the Guard have their headquarters there. And it is home to the Royal Philatelic Collection, the most complete collection of British postage stamps in the world. The albums contain every stamp ever issued by Great Britain and its colonies except one—the one-cent magenta.

So, for a few hours on a blustery March day, the Queen’s collection was complete.

And it is the Queen’s collection. The crown jewels, the artwork, and furnishings in the royal palaces, from the chandeliers to the china, are all owned by a royal charitable trust. The stamp collection is owned personally by the monarch and has been for generations. Prince Charles might well inherit the stamps on his mother’s death, assuming he succeeds her, just as she inherited them from her father, King George VI, who inherited them from his father, King George V. But she could leave the collection to the royal trust or to the British Library.

The writer David McClure, the author of the first full-1ength book on the royal family’s wealth in twenty years, estimated in 2015 that the philatelic holdings were worth £10 million, or about $14.8 million. But he noted that some estimates put their value as high as £100 million, which would amount to more than a third of the royal net-worth statement.

The philatelic assets are impressive, whatever they are worth. George V’s stamps are kept in 328 red album, George VI’s in more than a hundred blue boxes. The stamps issued since the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II are in green albums and green boxes.

One reason for Redden’s visit to the palace was to compare the one-cent magenta with some of the four-cent stamps from British Guiana in the Royal Philatelic Collection. Michael Sefi, the keeper of the Royal Philatelic Collection, told me that he had never seen the actual one-cent until Redden walked in.

Sefi told me he was surprised to learn, from me, that Redden was an American. Redden’s plummy voice and pleasantly formal manner seemed so British that they did not talk about American sitcoms—Sefi remains partial to Friends, which Redden had never watched—or major league baseball in the United States. Redden is no fan, but Sefi has been devoted to the St. Louis Cardinals since 1987, when the World Series was carried on television in Britain and the Cardinals lost by one game. Sefi told me that clinched “the notorious British affection for the underdog.” He is so passionate about the team that he took time off in the spring of 2016 to fly to St. Louis for a seven-game home stand.

Redden told me that they spent a few hours comparing it to other stamps “and, I think, satisfying [Sefi’s] own curiosity to look at this stamp.” Sefi said he was surprised that another one-cent magenta had never turned up, just as there has never been a single two-cent rose from 1851. Ten copies of that stamp exist, but all are in pairs on cover. (In Stamp World, “on cover” usually means on an envelope.)

But studying stamps was not Redden’s only purpose in going to see Sefi. He was making a sales call. Redden is discreet, and Sefi would not discuss their conversation with me either, but Redden did not need to be explicit. Sefi knew that in ninety days, the one-cent magenta would be available. Perhaps Sefi would consider bidding?

“There’s always something we’d quite like if it would come on the market,” Sefi told me later. “That’s the nature of collecting, isn’t it?” But he had heard the rumors that the Royal Philatelic Collection bid for the one-cent magenta at Redden’s auction, and he tamped them down: “We did not.”

Redden breezed into the Royal a couple of days later and hit a speed bump.

The Expert Committee’s command post is down a narrow corridor with old floorboards that creak beneath blue carpeting. Behind an unmarked door is a long, L-shaped room dominated by a conference table that is useful for spreading out pages from stamp albums. Leather-bound albums fill the shelves against the walls: albums for actual stamps from the British Empire, albums for mere photographs of stamps from the British Empire, albums for stamps from the rest of the world, and albums for stamps determined to be forgeries. The Royal keeps the forgeries, just in case a forger is dumb enough to try the same caper twice.

The Expert Committee is the Supreme Court of stamps: it handles only the most important cases, about three thousand a year, and like the Supreme Court, it keeps no official notes of its deliberations. There the comparisons to jurists in long black robes end. The members of the Expert Committee are unpaid volunteers, which means that they tend to be retired or semi-retired people. The workload is punishing, requiring detailed research before each of the committee’s meetings. Someone with a day job would surely fall behind, and that would be noticed—and whispered about.

No one really questioned the authenticity of the one-cent magenta as Redden opened his briefcase and laid it on the conference table; its years in du Pont’s safe-deposit box were well documented. For the Expert Committee, the next few hours were about scholarship, and probably bragging rights—“I held the one-cent magenta. With my tweezers, of course.”

For all its old-fashioned scholarship, the Expert Committee does more than look through magnifying glasses and make educated guesses. It does cutting-edge scientific sleuthing with the same kinds of machinery found in crime labs around the world. The Expert Committee uses the same kinds of devices that customs agencies use to spot doctored passports or birth certificates.

The company that makes the centerpiece of the Expert Committee’s arsenal, a machine known as a video spectral comparator, says similar instruments have examined disputed lottery tickets, contested wills, and suspicious stock certificates. The technology was perfected in England in the 1970s, and similar machines have put detectives on the trail of counterfeiters who turned out fake driver’s licenses, and medical-malpractice lawyers on the trail of doctors who altered patients’ hospital records. The machines have looked at contested maps of the Middle East where billions in oil revenue was at stake. The FBI, the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security all have the same equipment; many have the same model. The author Patricia Cornwell rented one for her research on Jack the Ripper. And a stamp figured in that. It had been licked by the person who put it on the envelope. Cornwell had the DNA on the stamp tested and found that it belonged to the British painter Walter Sickert, and Cornwell declared him the Ripper. (“Ripperologists” tore apart her findings; she countered that continuing the mystery served them better than did closing the case.)

This is the height of nondestructive testing: a camera that can zoom in to take images that make the grain of the paper look as jagged as a mountain range, and can be adjusted to examine a stamp with different filters and types of light—everything on the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared. It can, among other things, expose different inks on a single stamp. It can show when a stamp has been rubbed or scuffed.

And the certificate that the Expert Committee approved said just that—the stamp suffered from “surface rubbing,” wear and tear from being scuffed, pressed against other stamps in albums. This was a particularly British way of saying the face of the stamp was far from pristine. For all anyone knows, it could have been scuffed when it was still on the newspaper wrapper in British Guiana.

The next sentence was the one that would cause problems for Redden, for it raised the question of whether the one-cent magenta had had some cosmetic work done. It said the “surface rubbing” had been “reduced by overpainting at some time in the past,” meaning that someone had attempted to cover up the blemishes. In its crudest form, “over-painting” would involve mixing some magenta paint and swabbing it on the stamp. Perhaps one of the greatest collectors of all had ordered it done during the not quite forty years he owned it starting in 1878.

The 2014 committee referred to the problems because it had to reckon with Bacon, who had mentioned a slight disfigurement after seeing the stamp in Paris. “It was described in Bacon as rubbed,” Christopher G. Harman, the chairman of the Expert Committee and a past president of the Royal, told me the first time I met him. “It’s part of the history of the stamp,” and he did not care if spelling out that history complicated things for Redden. “We don’t always have one-hundred-percent satisfied customers,” he declared when I interviewed him a second time. “We are after the truth. We are trying to give a true evaluation of an item, which will include observations. Something that’s one hundred fifty years old is not going to be pristine.”

The committee knew it had been rubbed when Bacon inspected it. The committee also knew it did not appear rubbed when Redden brought it in. “It’s perfectly logical,” Harman explained. “Most of these stamps had the surface rubbed and then touched up. We accept the fact that this was enhanced by painting.”

The mention of the rubbing would leave some American collectors scratching their heads and saying that since the committee could not establish who had done it or when or why, the committee need not have mentioned it. But that bit of cosmetic work, if that is what it was, was not Harman’s only concern. “The color in the center is unnatural, and if you look at the front, there is no white showing.” This might or might not have been a liability: “Many of these get painted on the front. It was perfectly acceptable in those days. Today, you’d get scolded.”

Harman had seen the stamp twice before, in 1965 when it was shown in London and in 1986 when it was shown in Australia—but only the front was shown then. He told me that the real surprise in 2014 was what was on the back—the large wheel-like star symbol on the back of the stamp. “We’d never seen one before,” he said.

That was a footnote that did not deter the committee from reaching its verdict. Nor did the committee delay because the documentation was incomplete. Improbable as it sounds, Harman told me that the Royal’s copy of the 1935 certificate was nowhere to be found. “I know I’ve seen it,” he told me. “I remember seeing it.” But the folder containing it was missing.

No matter. The new certificate was quickly written out by Peter Lister, a retired chemistry teacher. He had filled out dozens of certificates in his years on the Expert Committee, but No. 217,796 was different. He felt a sudden sense of wonderment and pride. It was his signature that the public would see, his signature that would figure in the continuing history of one of the icons of philately. His hand shook from the first letter to the last.

“Here’s our patient, as they called it in London,” Redden announced brightly after shaking hands with another world-class expert, this one at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Postal Museum, next door to Union Station in Washington. The patient was the one-cent magenta, looking tiny and fragile on a velvet bed. The expert was the museum’s research scientist, a philatelist named Thomas M. Lera, who had agreed to put the stamp through its paces so the data about the one-cent magenta would be available to stamp collectors.

Redden and I were taking an early-morning train from New York with a security guard in tow. I met Redden at Pennsylvania Station, and I asked—quietly—where the stamp was. He half-whispered that, as always, it was in his briefcase, which he set in the luggage compartment over his head. Between Philadelphia and Baltimore, I asked him to take it down. I had been flirting with photography— like philately, another addictive hobby—and I had brought along a new camera that I wanted to try out. I watched the guard squirm as Redden moved the briefcase to the seat opposite his. A moment later, Redden lifted it onto his lap and hunched over it as the miles rolled by outside the window.

In New Jersey, someone else with an interest in the one-cent magenta boarded the train: Robert P. Odenweller, a philatelist so highly regarded that he was invited to serve on the Royal’s governing body even though he is an American. Odenweller wears many hats in Stamp World. He is also a member of the postal museum’s Council of Philatelists, and du Pont’s estate had hired him as an adviser—he had been a friend of du Pont’s. In his advisory role, he was firm about one point: nothing could undercut the Royal’s findings. Minutes after settling in next to Redden, he was telling me that the postal museum can do tests, but unlike the Royal, the postal museum does not render expert opinions. As it happened, that was the first thing Lera said after leading the way to his airy workroom, which had more devices than the Expert Committee’s room at the Royal. “More toys,” someone joked as Redden opened his briefcase and took out the stamp.

Redden, of course, had more in mind than just collecting data. He wanted to generate buzz about the auction. He already knew, from conversations with postal museum officials, that they would not bid on the stamp. But they had offered to display the stamp if the buyer would agree to a long-term loan.

First on the agenda was a procedure that would involve sliding the patient into a video spectral comparator like the one at the Royal. Lera also wanted to run some X-ray scans. These are not like hospital X-rays of broken bones; they do not yield images that a layman with a displaced wrist fracture can make sense of. Instead, they provide data points that a computer can assemble in a graph.

But Redden, worried about possible damage to the stamp, was not sure that he would let Lera put all the tools to use. Redden all but body-blocked Lera when Lera showed him a micrometer that could measure the thickness of the stamp. It had a lever and looked as if it would clamp down on the stamp like an embossing device. Redden worried that it would leave an impression, an indentation, on the surface of the stamp. He called the micrometer “the torture instrument.”

An infrared spectrometer also gave Redden pause, because it, too, had a lever that snapped down like a clamp. Redden saw the spectrometer as the Stamp World equivalent of a horror-movie hammerhead. It could ruin the stamp in a single chomp. For the rest of the day, the theme from Jaws played in my head.

“Doesn’t even put a dent in it,” Lera said, as he flipped the lever on notebook paper.

“I hope not,” Redden said, unconvinced. The Jaws music in my head got louder.

What followed was a physics lesson that turned into a rebuttal to the Royal on the abrasion issue—the “rubbing” that Sir Edward had noted and the Expert Committee had mentioned on the certificate—and the coloring problem on the back that had troubled Harman.

Lera, writing in a scientific journal, once described his work as “exciting electrons in the atoms. These atoms then emit photons.” The photons can be charted, and from that data, someone like Lera can assemble a biography of a stamp different from the usual description in words.

Lera began by demonstrating what his machines could do. He slid in a pair of one-penny stamps from Mauritius into the spectral comparator. As Redden and I looked over his shoulder, with Odenweller a few feet away, Lera said that the two stamps were about the same age as the one-cent magenta, but far less valuable. And something was wrong with the postmark on one. The machine showed the postmark contained two colors of ink. The line of the circle had been altered. “I’m pretty sure it was done with a Sharpie,” he said with a chuckle.

Lera had promised that his examination of the stamp would be noninvasive, and the stamp was all but untouched. Even so, I was still hearing the Jaws music as Lera looked at the brightly colored lines in a graph on a computer monitor and announced, “It’s the original ink.” He changed some settings as he showed us the postmark. Redden declared happily, “That’s the first time I’ve seen the 1856 so clearly delineated.”

The readings showed that the pigment that gave the paper its magenta color was identical all the way through. No one could have created an exact match to the pigment later on. It was this finding that put Lera at odds with the Royal and its notion of over-painting. Lera would have detected a color wash, a dye job to bring back the original color and rid the stamp of its tired, rubbed appearance.

Redden understood the implications: the entire sheet must have been painted before it went through the printing press. Whatever scuffing or rubbing that Bacon remembered from his look at the stamp in 1891 was nothing more than normal wear and tear.

So Washington was at odds with London over a small point. But Stamp World lives for small points. What was important, what mattered to the world beyond Stamp World, was that there were no doubts on either side of the Atlantic about the authenticity of the one-cent magenta.

Redden, elated, could go home to New York with only one item left on his to-do list: sell the stamp.

As an auctioneer, Redden does not babble into the microphone at dizzying speeds. Nor does he induce reluctant bidders to put up their paddles by glaring at them. He is not one for cajoling or browbeating, at least not in public. He is traveling the road paved by Peter Cecil Wilson, who was Sotheby’s top executive from 1958 to 1979. “The cunning of Wilson,” a colleague once said, “is that there is no cunning.”

It was Wilson who introduced the marketing and hype that became everyday tools in Redden’s trade but were unknown in the 1950s. Wilson turned a sale of post-Impressionist paintings into a black-tie evening, with A-list celebrity guests like Lady Churchill, Somerset Maugham, Margot Fonteyn, and Kirk Douglas.

But the post-Impressionist auction was more than a party; it was the beginning of a transformation. Auction houses had been, in effect, wholesalers—middlemen— selling to dealers. Under Wilson, Sotheby’s became a retailer tantalizing, and selling directly to, collectors. Out went the quiet certainty of the private sale; in came the hubbub of the sales room, and with it a certain theatricality. Some art-world historians even credit Wilson with making auction houses the force that supplanted museum curators and cloistered scholars as arbiters of taste. Wilson—and, eventually, Redden—could not resist the ever-rising spiral of “record price” auctions.

It was the day of the sale, and about two hundred people, by one bartender’s estimate, were mingling at a cocktail party in a large, bright space outside the auction room. It was far fewer than at the 1970 sale, when the turnout was about six hundred, or the 1980 sale, when du Pont was one in a thousand.

Finally the doors parted, and the crowd moved into the auction room. Redden was wearing a microphone like a television personality, and the room had the layout and trappings of a television studio—the antiseptic chill of the air, the wide stage area, the shopworn lectern that would look just fine on camera. A giant video screen dominated the high-ceilinged space, and a row of cameras had been set up in the back. They had unobstructed views of the stamp, up front in a clear plastic column. One middle-aged man in the room said the column reminded him of one he had seen at a birthday party for a hip-hop mogul, except that there had been an almost-naked woman dancing inside the column at the party.

“This is like a horse race—it will be over in four minutes, just like Belmont,” Redden had told me earlier. But actually, it was over in two, about as long as the first couple of commercials on Jeopardy!, which in New York was being broadcast at about the same time. But sitting in the plush studio-audience seats at Jeopardy! would have been more comfortable. The audience at Sotheby’s ended up squeezing into chairs with shiny metal frames and hard-plastic seats that had been jammed as close together as possible.

No one said, “All right, Mr. Redden, the stamp is ready for its close-up.” No one had to. Its moment had come, and he knew it. He pulled on too-tight cotton gloves— “We wouldn’t want to leave any fingerprints, now would we?” he said as he opened the back of the column. The stamp itself was in no danger of being touched. It was lying in its little see-through carrier, face up, the same position as when it had gone on display on its pre-auction tour. Newspaper and wire-service photographers rushed forward. For a moment the buzz of the audience was drowned out by a metallic beating of wings, the sound of all those shutters flapping—the sound some of the same cameras have made when this or that celebrity was on a red carpet or this or that disgraced public official finally resigned. It was a frenzy, and watching it, Frank J. Buono, a stamp dealer from Binghamton, New York, told me, “I don’t think they’d get that coverage for a van Gogh.”

Just out of camera range is a long desk occupied by young assistants, each with a telephone or a computer. Those with the telephones tell unseen bidders how the auction is going and get Redden’s eye when the person on the phone wants to get in on the action. This lets buyers acquire their treasures without having to interrupt their schedules to attend auctions in person. David M. Rubenstein, the hedge- fund manager who bought the Bay Psalm Book, called in from Australia. But bidders can also use telephone bidding to remain anonymous. The assistants who place their bids do not identify them by name, only by the number they were assigned when they registered to bid. Unless hackers strike, their secrets are safe with Sotheby’s.

Before he opened the bidding, Redden plodded through the preliminaries, a kind of throat-clearing that quieted the crowd and satisfied Sotheby’s lawyers, who wanted the fine-print dicta in the back of the auction catalogue read aloud, just in case the winning bidder was such a newbie that he was unaware that “on the fall of the auctioneer’s hammer, the winning bidder will immediately pay the purchase price or such part as we may require.” It’s the same kind of uninspiring wording that the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter once observed in a different context was “as joyless to read as it must have been to write.” Redden also read the Royal’s certificate, including the line about over-painting.

Sotheby’s had prequalified the bidders, requiring them to hand over certified checks before they got their paddles. So, in the standing-room-only crowd, Redden was really playing to only a few, and he knew exactly who they were.

Not all of them were in the hard chairs facing the lectern. Sotheby’s has what Redden called “skyboxes”— suites for preferred customers that ring the room. They are not as lavish as the skyboxes at the Super Bowl, which can go for $400,000 and up. Cream-colored curtains guard the plate-glass windows. Some bidders pull them wide open; some leave them closed. Sometimes faces peek through a slit, like a nervous performer before a talent show. Once the bidding begins, they do not hold paddles up to the glass. They communicate with the young assistants on the telephones.

Downstairs on the floor, heads turned to see who had the paddles, and the deep pockets, to buy the one-cent magenta. Many in the crowd, maybe most, are Stamp World types who do not plan to bid. For them, the auction is like a horse race. They are nothing more than eager spectators. They want to be able to say they were there when the one-cent magenta was sold. They just want bragging rights: I was there. That was what Buono told me as I took the seat next to him. Buono did not register. No paddle for him.

Redden, determined to set a record, opened the bidding at $4.5 million.

THREE

ONE CENT

1856: Printed, Sold, and Forgotten

S ome stamps begin with tantalizing stories. A governor’s impatient wife mails the invitations to her fancy-dress ball, and the stamps on the envelopes— the handful that are not thrown away the morning after— become rarities: the Post Office Mauritius stamps. Or a pressman makes a mistake, and the biplanes are printed upside down—one hundred stamps bought at the post office for $24 and soon sold to a collector for fifteen thousand: the Inverted Jenny stamps.

The one-cent magenta’s appeal came not from being an error but from being overlooked and forgotten. This was also pretty much the story of the place it came from, a place on the right shoulder of South America. Like China and India, Guiana was one of the places Columbus missed on the way to wherever it was that he actually went. It was a backwater before there were backwaters. Later it was picked off by one European monarch after another.

But first it was El Dorado. Lesser explorers like Amerigo Vespucci in 1499, followed by Vicente Yanez Pinzon in 1500, sailed away repeating the stories that transformed Guiana into a destination. But since none of them had actually found any treasure, it was nothing more than hearsay, really: an unconquered paradise deep in the jungle, a place with endless gold, silver, and jewels, as well as mermaids and headless men. Spain promptly claimed the wild coast, as did Portugal. Neither sent settlers to hack away at the jungle and establish colonies, though, and in Europe, the monarchs feuded. They didn’t take the law into their own hands—they went to an unusually high court, the Vatican. A series of papal bulls fixed a line of demarcation that gave Brazil to Portugal and made Guiana a no-man’s-land.

Somewhat later in the parade of frustrated explorers came Sir Walter Raleigh, who wanted the political riches as much as the gold. He wrote a best-selling account with a tell-all title: The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) and the Provinces of Emeria, Arromaia, Amapaia and other Countries, with their rivers adjoining. The text —at thirty-four thousand words a fraction of the length of, say, Lewis and Clark’s journals—was as exaggerated as a tourist-office brochure. Guiana “hath more quantity of gold, by manifold, than the best parts of the Indies, or Peru,” Raleigh postulated, adding that all corners of Guiana “appear marvellous rich.” His little rhapsody was so tantalizing that the Pilgrims weighed pointing the May-flower toward Guiana. Apparently they gave more weight to the inconvenient truth that Raleigh had failed to find gold in South America. (Back in London after a huge but fruitless expedition to Guiana, Raleigh was executed because an earlier death sentence had never been lifted.)

Next came the Dutch, who saw the possibilities of a tropical Holland in what they called Novo Zeelandia. They chartered a trading company and established three colonies, but like Raleigh, they overstated things. Pamphlets aimed at would-be settlers described the fortunes to be made in Novo Zeelandia and stated that “there were many advantages in Guiana as compared with the New Netherlands [New York].”

Guiana went through several turnovers—first Britain invaded the three Dutch colonies, then the French ousted the British and returned the colonies to Dutch control. Finally the British seized them again in the Napoleonic Wars and began making British Guiana distinctly British. But the British never fully rinsed out the tastes of the past. Well into the twentieth century, the central district of the capital was known by the original Dutch name, Stabroek. In contrast to Barbados, which became known as “Little England,” British Guiana never really satisfied the British. “The museum is somewhat superior to those in other British colonies in the region, but there is no decent library,” sniffed the historian W. Adolphe Roberts, who wrote extensively on the Caribbean colonies.

Far more famous visitors stopped by. Evelyn Waugh was welcomed like a celebrity, although he denied that competing reporters from local newspapers had trailed him because he was well known: “All first-class passengers are given column interviews on arrival at Georgetown.” But few are grilled the way Waugh was. One of the reporters in the capital city pulled out a clipping of a newspaper article in which Waugh had declared— facetiously, he now insisted—that “the beetles in Guiana were as big as pigeons, and that one killed them with shotguns.” The reporters warned that if he had come to take aim at the beetles, he would be disappointed.

They asked what he knew about Guiana’s natural resources. “This was their stock, foolproof question,” he said, “because most visitors to Georgetown came there with some idea of prospecting for diamonds or gold”—El Dorado, first and always. But Waugh was no prospector. His itinerary called for him to sail into Brazil and find the Amazon. The disappointed reporters put their notebooks in their pockets and went off to write their stories, leaving Waugh “to tackle the old problem of getting through the afternoon, which, next to the problem of getting through the morning, is one of the hardest a lonely man can set himself.” He went for a walk. He, too, visited the museum— it “took some finding”—and he, too, complained about it, from its musty smell and faded photographs to its collection of “the worst stuffed animals I have seen anywhere.”

Anthony Trollope had gone to Guiana for his day job as a postal inspector, which was separate from his sideline as a writer. He had already “[raced] about England and Ireland doing official (and officious) work for the Post Office … extending rural service [and] installing letter boxes (which he invented).” He had walked backward through the General Post Office in London, even on the staircases, as he led a tour for a queen—“I think Saxony,” he wrote in his autobiography. The barons with her tipped him half a crown for his effort. “That,” he wrote with understandable understatement, “was a bad moment.”

If this “incarnate gale of wind” had blustered into British Guiana sooner, we might know more about how the one-cent magenta came into being, for surely he would have written thousands of words about the cooperation between the local post office and the local newspaper. But he did not arrive until 1860, four years after the one-cent magenta had been printed, sold, and forgotten.

Trollope liked British Guiana. “There never was a land so ill spoken of—and never one that deserved it so little,” he wrote, calling it “the transatlantic Eden.” He pronounced British Guiana well run, with “no noisy sessions of Parliament as in Jamaica [and] no money squabbles as in Barbados.” Trollope reported that the government posted a surplus and that trade was thriving. His hotel was the best in town, but he complained about holes in the curtains, “the mosquitoes having driven me to very madness.” They were a problem on the road, too. Trollope rode in a horse-drawn mail carriage with five paying passengers. It took the bumps hard. An axle snapped, and they had to wait for a couple of hours “among the mosquitoes! … Ugh! Ugh!”

Mail coaches—and mail itself—had helped bind Britain together. But using the mail as a unifying force proved difficult in British Guiana, where roads had yet to reach into the jungle. The real roads were the rivers, and the boats that navigated them were not dependable. Without land routes, few settlements sprang up. And to have a postal system, you need destinations, places where the mail can be delivered.

Now for the part that’s inevitable in a book about a stamp, the part that another book about another stamp described as “philatelic facts, which are usually dry.” But nothing like a good martini.

In 1840, there was a notable development for British Guiana steamships: picked up mail for the first time. The little colony was now connected to London by the newest and fastest means.

Of course, nothing was terribly new or British about mail. The Dutch West India Company had set up a mail system in 1796. Smallish sailing vessels made the rounds, using a hub-and-spoke system centered on Barbados. It was the same kind of arrangement that airlines would adopt later: to get to Omaha or Abilene, you have to go through Chicago or Dallas. But the Dutch mail was plagued by dishonest captains, and slow voyages made delivery less than reliable.

The changing casts in government in Guiana— Dutch, British, French, and British again—did not help. The postmasters installed with each takeover came and went with their superiors without improving mail service. In 1820 the postmaster was found to have “let out the Office … to different persons” for fourteen of the sixteen years since he was appointed. Even in the early years of British rule, the postal system was a low priority, and corruption sometimes lurked behind the post office counter.

By 1856, when the one-cent magenta was commissioned and printed, there was more for the postmaster in British Guiana to worry about than just running out of stamps from London. Past accounts of the one-cent magenta have overlooked racial tensions that had been simmering for years—tensions that would have raised the anxiety level of anyone who ran a business that dealt with the public, especially one that reached across the different elements of a frazzled colony. A race riot erupted early that year, but there was nothing new about racial unrest in British Guiana. In 1847, a Portuguese man had assaulted and injured a black laborer. Black residents “felt exploited by the Portuguese, who controlled the retail shops,” the scholar George K. Danns has written, and when a rumor spread that the black man had died, a mob formed and looted Portuguese-owned shops.

In late 1855, a street-corner preacher returned home to British Guiana after leading anti-Catholic disturbances in England, Scotland, and Ireland. John Sayers Orr brought his trumpet—his nickname was “Angel Gabriel,” and as always, he blew on the horn to draw attention as he traipsed through the streets of Georgetown. “Nobody expected any trouble,” the historian V.O. Chan wrote in 1970, adding that as far as Orr was concerned, “sensible people probably thought he was an amusing and harmless crackpot.”

But he rekindled black anger at the largely Catholic Portuguese, whom the white British ruling class also resented. In fact, the authorities tacitly encouraged black residents to attack Portuguese businesses. The police response was slow, perhaps deliberately so. Eventually, though, Orr was jailed in a government crackdown. That set off what the governor called “open insurrection,” and soon the black rioters overpowered the police. Troops from the West Indies had to be called in.

The post office in Georgetown was apparently untouched. But the turmoil must have concerned the postmaster, Edward Thomas Evans Dalton. Short on inventory in early 1856, he might even have worried that shipments of stamps from Britain would not survive the shortest leg of the journey, from the dock in Georgetown to his post office. Whoever was supposed to carry them could be ambushed by an angry crowd. If that happened, the stamps themselves could be burned, or dumped in the Atlantic. So, as he had in past years when he was running low on stamps and shipments from London did not arrive on schedule, Dalton went to the Royal Gazette for “provisionals”—stamps printed locally. The little newspaper in Georgetown had a printing press—not as large or as fancy as the ones in London, and not equipped the way presses in Britain were. The machine at the Royal Gazette could not handle engravings, but even if it could have, no one in British Guiana could have produced an engraving fast enough.

The Royal Gazette prepared the provisionals the only way it could, by hand setting type, letter by letter. A printer reached into a type case, no doubt divided into little sections for each letter and number. At least this time the Gazette spelled all the words right. In 1853, when the Gazette printed a batch of one- and four-cent provisional for Dalton, the word “Petimus” (“We give and ask in return”) had been misspelled as “Patimus” (“We suffer in return”).

“Patimus” probably expressed Dalton’s feelings better. Dalton lasted thirty-seven years as postmaster despite tussles with his Colonial Office bosses in London. Time after time they suspended him, only to reinstate him, and for the most part he managed to sidestep inquiries about perpetual deficits and irregularities. The questioning from London must have been humiliating. Dalton came from a well-connected family that established a dynasty in the post office, ending the rapid turnover of the early years under the British. Dalton’s father had been the postmaster before him, after giving up on a career as a sugar planter, and Dalton’s son took over as the postmaster after him.

The Gazette, though privately owned, was as much a part of the official fabric of British Guiana as the post office, and it had learned the hard way to be careful about what it published in its bland-looking pages. Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, later the editor of the Boston Post, had worked as a printer at the Gazette in the 1830s. In a memoir, he described a morning when Georgetown was rocked by a salute from an artillery detachment in the harbor, followed by an announcement: “The King is dead.” A sailing vessel had arrived with news of the death of King William IV. “The papers brought by the ship gave all the details,” Shillaber wrote, but when the Gazette published the news that afternoon, the Colonial Secretary stormed into the Gazette’s office, demanding to know why the Gazette had not waited for orders. “The King was not yet dead, officially, and such elaborate demonstration of grief, under the circumstances, was not called for.” The official announcement arrived a week or so later, and when it did, the Gazette treated it as if it were new news.

Shillaber liked one of the Gazette's owners, William Dallas—“a more perfect gentleman and a better printer I had never met with.” Shillaber’s only mention of the other owner, Joseph Baum, had to do with Baum’s wife, a fellow passenger on the ship that had carried Shillaber from New England to British Guiana. She got him talking about print shops he had worked in—and used the information to get her husband some help in the composing room, because skilled labor did not arrive every day.

Baum and Dallas wanted their provisional stamps to look like stamps. They pulled the image of a ship from among the cuts that would have been stowed away in any nineteenth-century print shop. Some postal historians have said that image appeared with the shipping news column in the Gazette, but the Gazette carried no such column in the 1850s.

They probably ran off sheets of four, a two-by-two grid. That’s the best guess. No one knows. Philatelists have long wondered which position the one-cent magenta occupied before the sheet was cut and the stamps initialed by post office workers—in the case of the one-cent magenta, E.D. Wight. The initials were said to guard against fraud, though it is hard to imagine counterfeit stamps in British Guiana.

Wight seemed not to care that a stamp he had handled and marked went on to become famous. When Sir Edward Denny Bacon, the unquestionably authoritative collector and curator, published a paper on the stamps of British Guiana, he said he had been assured that “Mr. Wight is still alive and living in the colony, but he is in his dotage and either cannot or will not remember anything about these old stamps except that he initialed them. He has been so pestered on the subject that the mention of old stamps to him is like a red rag to a bull.”

FOUR

SIX SHILLINGS

1873: Found by a Twelve-Year-Old

I t was found seventeen years after it was issued, perhaps in an attic, perhaps in a closet, perhaps in a forgotten drawer—the details are fuzzy. The finder did not realize, when he grabbed the one-cent magenta and took it home to soak it off whatever it had been stuck to, that he had stumbled across something. And that created the kind of story that fueled long-shot dreams of fledgling stamp collectors who cracked the bindings on their brand-new stamp albums and plunged in, hoping to find that one precious stamp someday. It was like panning for gold, something else people did in British Guiana.

Louis Vernon Vaughan, twelve years old and caught up in the then-new fad of stamp collecting, found that one precious stamp in 1873 but did not know it. He sold it for six shillings, or about $16.83 in today’s dollars. “The worst stamp swap in history,” the stamp writer Viola Ilma called it.

Vaughan grew up to be a tax collector in British Guiana—he lived there all his life—and as an old man was teased about not striking it rich when he had the chance. The one-cent magenta “was always referred to as the one that got away,” one of his descendants told me.

Vaughan found it at the house of an uncle. Andrew Hunter came from a line of resolute Scots who became sugar planters when they immigrated to British Guiana, but he had given up. He had moved to Barbados after forty-some years in British Guiana, and the house he left in British Guiana was a mess. Vaughan, tracked down by reporters long after the one-cent magenta had become famous, did not explain why Hunter had left behind so much junk that had to be cleaned out, only that the mess included “a whole lot of old family letters” with stamps that Vaughan could hardly wait to add to his album.

Among them was the one-cent magenta, tattered-looking even then. Surely little Louis (“Louie” to his descendants) had memorized the stamps that had been issued in British Guiana—the provisionals that Dalton had commissioned over the years, as well as the regular issues that were printed in London. This was not one he recognized, and he was not impressed. The one-cent magenta’s “condition … would not be tolerated by discriminating collectors in a much commoner stamp,” the stamp experts L.N. and Maurice Williams wrote a century later.

But Vaughan did not understand its rarity. From the first, he considered the one-cent magenta “a very ordinary one … not a particularly fine specimen,” and certainly not unique. “I was quite certain that it could easily be replaced by a better specimen when next I took the trouble to reach through the old family letters,” he told the London Daily Mail in 1934.

He did not say when it dawned on him that he would never find another one-cent magenta, and there were other mysteries he did not explain. He certainly did not admit whether he had been responsible for the one-cent magenta’s strange shape—whether it was he who had snipped off the corners, or whether they were already gone when he found it. Vaughan the adult was as uninformative as Vaughan the boy had been impatient.

The one-cent magenta “was not in my album for long,” he recalled. He wanted something—a batch of more attractive stamps that a dealer in England had sent him on approval. The dealer was Alfred Smith and Company, which had jumped on the stamp-collecting bandwagon in the 1860s, targeting boys like Vaughan with advertisements in magazines that reached throughout the English-speaking world. Smith believed in magazines. From 1863 to the mid-1870s, he and his partner, his brother Henry Stafford Smith, published the Stamp-Collector’s Magazine. (Another Smith, the early philatelic writer Bertram Tapscott Knight Smith, mentioned the Stamp-Collector’s Magazine and the Timbre-Poste of Brussels as “the foundation of all philatelic knowledge.” The Timbre-Poste would later provide a forum for charges that the one-cent magenta was a fake.)

Addicts know the desperation of desire. Vaughan felt it as he thumbed through his album, thinking about new stamps he could buy. He probably had not seen the July 1, 1865, issue of Smith’s magazine, which carried an article about stamps from British Guiana. The article was written by Frederick Adolphus Philbrick, who used the pseudonym Damus Petimusque Vicissim, a play on the motto on stamps from British Guiana that means “we will now turn.”

British Guiana came late to an endeavor whose origins are hazy—whoever picked up, sorted, and delivered the primordial mail is unknown. The Persian emperor Cyrus established a more or less permanent postal system in the sixth century BC, the first in recorded history. The Roman emperor Augustus developed post roads with relay stations stretching out from Rome and “public couriers,” but they were public in name only; they stood ready to carry official messages and nothing else. Centuries later Charlemagne pushed the nascent postal grid into Germany and France. Later still, kings and bishops relied on their own messengers until the mid-fifteenth century, when Franz von Taxis fashioned a monopoly on the mails that reached from Vienna to Brussels, the first lasting postal link between nations.

The word “post” began to appear in English after Edward IV set up relay stations where messengers could change horses in the last years of the fifteenth century. “Post” was derived from a Middle French term for men on horseback responsible for transporting letters along a route and the relief riders who took over along the way.

Britain’s General Post Office dates to the mid-seventeenth century, although the crown had conferred titles like “Master of the Posts” or “Chief Post-Master” long before that—and the royal posts served the royal family and their court but were allowed to carry the occasional private letter, so long as the carrier did not have to go out of his way to deliver it. That reflected the British preoccupation with efficiency. A seventeenth-century entrepreneur named William Dockwra recognized the need for speed. He promised delivery of letters that absolutely, positively had to go across London quickly. James E. Casey, who in 1907 founded, with a hundred borrowed dollars, the crosstown messenger operation in Seattle that became United Parcel Service, was just following in the footsteps of Dockwra and his men. Dockwra opened special receiving stations across a seven-mile stretch of London. His carriers collected letters on an hourly schedule, hustled them to sorting centers—one was in Dockwra’s own house—and hurried off to deliver them by hand.

Dockwra’s biggest innovations involved the charges to customers. “Just a penny per item—regardless of the length of the letter,” Duncan Campbell-Smith wrote in his comprehensive account of the British postal system. Even more revolutionary was who paid the penny: the sender, not the recipient.

Dockwra’s operation was “known to all as the Penny Post.” Dockwra himself called it a “New and Useful Invention,” and its success was immediate. So was its nationalization. Dockwra did not profit the way Casey did—in fact, he was hit with “a hefty fine for infringing on the Crown’s postal monopoly” before his system was absorbed into the General Post Office (though it remained a separate unit and retained its penny pricing). Dockwra even had to fight for a pension.

Through the eighteenth century, the main postal routes stretched out from London, but cross-country service remained iffy and rates prohibitive. The system was plagued by hard-to-calculate charges for the distance a letter had to be carried. Different clerks could arrive at different fees for letters to the same address. The bewildering rules, the confusing zones, the imponderable add-ons— the clerks had discretion, and they made mistakes. And mail became more expensive. Postal rates increased five times between 1784 and 1812. Sending a one-page letter cost a minimum of four pence (as much as $92.81 in today’s dollars), but because postage was calculated by distance, that initial charge took the letter only fifteen miles. It cost as much as fifteen pence, or as much as $347.81 in today’s dollars, to go five or six hundred miles.

Postmarks were a much earlier invention. The credit apparently goes to Henry Bishop, Britain’s postmaster general in the late seventeenth century. A Bishop postmark was wordy and promotional: “The post for all Kent goes every night from the Round House, Love Lane, and comes every morning.” Mail sent through Dockwra’s system received two postmarks, but they were concise, for they served a purpose other than marketing. One read, “Penny Post Paid.” The other, in a heart shape, listed the time at which the letter was due at its destination. “Mor 11,” for example, for eleven o’clock in the morning, or “Af 3” for three o’clock in the afternoon.

With the takeover by the national postal service came spelling errors like “Penny Post Payd” that surely had literate Londoners tut-tutting. Nor could the civil servants of the Post Office show their love. The heart-shaped postmark became circular.

The list of the world’s serendipitous inventions is long. Consider these five: LSD, originally synthesized to boost circulation and respiration; corn flakes, originally made from bread dough left out too long; the microwave oven, reverse engineered because a candy bar melted. (The gooey mess appeared in the pocket of a scientist too close to the radar components he was testing.) And there are the twin V’s, Velcro and Viagra, the first developed by an electrical engineer who noticed stuck-together burrs in his pants, the other by researchers who observed a side effect of the heart drug they were working on.

The case can be made that the modern postage stamp belongs on the list.

Rowland Hill, who created it, was an ambitious schoolmaster who followed his father into teaching. He was also an amateur engineer—he had designed his school’s innovative central heating system and its observatory— and he was a painter, a sideline that would figure in postal history later on. But above all, he was a systems analyst, although no one used that term in the 1830s when Hill prepared a pamphlet called “Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability.”

Perfectionist that he was, Hill assembled figures and facts that were “unpleasant,” the postal historian Laurin Zilliacus wrote, “but hardly surprising to the authorities or even the public.” He documented the stark reality of continually rising mail charges, declining revenues and substandard service. But improving the Post Office’s performance was not all that he had in mind. Hill was first and foremost an educator, and he had an educator’s vision of the role that an institution like the Post Office could play in British life. He cared less that the public was not getting its money’s worth. His concern was “the obstruction thus raised to the moral and intellectual progress of the people; and that the Post Office, if put on a sound footing, would assume the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilization.” The Post Office could function as a classroom beyond the classroom, promoting literacy and sensibility.

But the Post Office did not want him behind the counter, much less making postal policy, just as it had not let him observe its operations from within: “I applied for permission to see the working of the London office, but was met by a polite refusal.” Smithsonian magazine’s website speculated that when they read Hill’s pamphlet, narrow-minded postal officials uttered “things like ‘crikey!’ and ‘I say!” and ‘what hufflepuffery’ and other exclamations popular among the blustery Victorian bureaucrat set.”

It was as if he had called for an all-out intervention. Hill became a polarizing figure at the center of a national debate. The philatelist David Beech pointed out to me that others advocated reforms—he mentioned Sir Henry Cole, who invented commercial Christmas cards—but Hill is the one who is remembered. The Post Office’s chief secretary bellowed: “Fallacious, preposterous, utterly unsupported by facts and resting entirely on assumption.” But some influential Londoners were not so sure. “Mr. Place, a prominent citizen noted for his crusty temper and far from radical … views, took up the pamphlet ready to enjoy some snorts of indignation over the crackpot author,” Zilliacus reported. “His reading was at first interspersed with ‘Pish’ and ‘Pshaw.’” But by the last page, Hill had won him over, and he “turned his snorts on opponents.”

Hill advocated monumental change: prepayment. Like Dockwra before him, Hill called for the sender to pay the postage—but now for all letters, not just those expedited by messengers. He fretted that the public would reject his startling departure from the time-honored custom of the recipient’s paying; he gambled that making the rate uniform and slashing it to a penny would “neutralize all pecuniary objection to its being invariably paid in advance.” Collecting postage on delivery was “an important incentive, it was thought, to the post boys” on the streets, but at best it made for sloppy accounting; at worst, it opened the door to corruption. The populist in Hill also wanted to address an unfairness he remembered from a childhood in a schoolteacher’s cash-poor household. “Every day that brought post-letters brought also a demand for payment, the postman waiting at the door till he had received his money,” he wrote. “In the very early period, when we were most straitened in means, his rap was not always welcome.” And there was junk mail even then, and he objected to the strain it put on the postal system and the financial pressure it put on addressees. “Tradesmen’s circulars, in particular, which sometimes came from a considerable distance, and always unpaid, were great causes of disappointment and irritation,” he wrote.

It did not take much to see that people were giving the mailman the slip or that avoiding postage was a preoccupation of the rank and file. Hill quoted the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “One day, when I had not a shilling which I could spare, I was passing by a cottage … where a letter-carrier was demanding a shilling for a letter, which the woman of the house appeared unwilling to pay.” Coleridge stepped in and paid the money, but as soon as the postman was out of earshot, the woman told Coleridge he’d been had. “The letter was from her son, who took that means of letting her know that he was well”—he sent such letters regularly and never wrote anything inside. Together, Coleridge and the woman opened the letter, and sure enough, it was blank. (Hill eventually became so famous that some accounts mistakenly report it was Hill, not Coleridge, who happened by and paid the tab on the empty letter.)

That was hardly the only dodge. Hill complained that “hundreds, if not thousands, of newspapers were annually posted which no one particularly cared to read.” What people read were the wrappers, on which they wrote their private codes. Hill detailed the ciphers that a grocer in Edinburgh had worked out with a friend in London. There were six different ways for the friend to write the grocer’s name. Each told something about the price of items that fluctuated. Variations on the address—“Street” or “St.”—provided additional information about whether to mark up the prices of merchandise the grocer already had on hand in anticipation of the next, more expensive shipment.

Hill also argued that the postal system catered to the haves over the have-nots. One target was franking, the privilege of sending mail without having to pay postage (the term frank came from the Latin francus, for free). Franking was available to many British officials—and through them to people who were not using the mail for government business. Lawmakers in the United States later tried to ward this off with statutes making it a crime to use government mail for anything that is not official. But in Hill’s London, it seemed that anyone with a friend in Parliament could easily get his mail franked; those who needed free postage the least abused the privilege the most. Hill complained that “members of the favoured classes” had sent everything from a piano to actual people— specifically, two “maid servants”—and all kinds of animals: at least one cow, a horse, and hounds.

Even more significant than proposing prepayment and doing away with franking, Hill suggested abolishing the distance-based rates. What he said that Britain needed was a flat nationwide rate of a single penny. Birmingham to Edinburgh? One penny, the same as for London to Oxford.

Barred from looking at the Post Office’s ledgers, Hill tallied what losses he could. He figured that mail “refused, mis-sent or redirected” cost the Post Office £122,000 or as much as $629.3 million in today’s dollars. Startling as those numbers were, another number that Hill came up with was startling because it was so small: one thirty-sixth of a penny. That, according to Hill’s calculations, was the most it cost the Post Office to transport a letter from London to Edinburgh —and it did not cost much more to move one piece of mail from Plymouth to Newcastle upon Tyne. But the postage from London to Edinburgh was one shilling and one penny, and Hill, always focused on efficiency, was unhappy that the Post Office wasted time calculating the mileage for each letter.

Hill had friends in Parliament who pushed for his changes, and the post office was overhauled according to Hill’s blueprint, even as postal officials took issue with his notion of supply and demand—that lowering postage rates would drive up volume and revenue, because more people could afford to send more letters. Hill was indeed wrong about that: revenue went into a nosedive and took nearly a decade to crawl to break-even levels. But public attention had shifted to the innovation that Hill had played down, if he even foresaw its potential—the postage stamp.

Most letter-writers had depended on pre-stamped stationery, and Hill did not expect “government sticking plasters” on “little bags called envelopes” to eclipse all-in-one letters. Too inconvenient. Too much of a do-it-yourself project. Too foreign to the habits of Englishmen, as one of Hill’s opponents put it. And, for the Post Office, too problematic. Envelopes in all shapes and sizes would make sorting the mail more difficult. Different thicknesses of paper could add weight, burdening anyone and anything carrying mailbags, from long-distance stagecoaches to village postmen.

But stamps caught on because the pre-stamped stationery introduced with Hill’s rate change was a fiasco. The Post Office had commissioned the well-known artist William Mulready to design the one-piece cover. As the historian F. George Kay, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, later explained it, Mulready’s design “was supposed to be ‘highly poetic,’ but was in fact in execrable taste.” It was also laughable, because Mulready’s seven winged messengers had a total of only thirteen legs. Britain had a good chuckle, the Post Office discarded and destroyed the unsold Mulready covers, and the public turned to the “sticking plasters.” The first was an endearing, enduring hit, the template for British stamps ever since. It was the stylized silhouette of Queen Victoria, the Penny Black.

Hill’s fingerprints were all over it, because he roughed out the design himself—he was a painter, after all—based on a medal of Queen Victoria, then only two years into her reign. She loved it, and George Kay, who was so scathing about the Mulready cover, could only rave. “The lovely portrait of the eighteen-year-old queen, the bold lettering, the simple background and the aesthetically satisfying border design have never been improved in all the tens of thousands of British and foreign successors since—the vast majority of which are, of course, imitations of this first stamp.”

One of those imitations was the one-cent magenta. It shared the Penny Black’s simplicity, even if it showed a sailing vessel, not the queen. When it was printed, Victoria had been on the throne for nineteen years, less than a third of her reign.

By then, or by the 1870s, when young Louis Vernon Vaughan was building his collection in British Guiana, stamps were novel and cool and—believe it or not—high-tech. Stamps had to be printed and perforated and gummed. It took machinery to do all that when machinery was new and intricate and intriguing, and in a backward crown colony like British Guiana where such machinery was slow to arrive, accounts of the way stamps were made in far-off London must have been almost as fascinating as the stamps themselves. Stamps—real stamps, not improvised substitutes like the one-cent magenta— were mass-produced on the latest steam-powered presses, shiny machines that people way off in British Guiana could only dream about. Boys like Vaughan—as well as plenty of adults—were captivated.

And so philately was born. But it always comes back to that word. There are those who maintain that “philately” is the wrong word for what philatelists do. For that they have one of their own to blame. Celebrated as the world’s first stamp collector by some who have followed in his tracks—or perhaps as the founder of the first club for stamp collectors, a group that lasted only a few months—Georges Herpin was one of stamp collecting’s early elite, a regular in the Parisian salons where stamps were being talked about and the shops where they were being traded. He complained in the mid-1860s that stamp collecting was becoming known as timbrologie, or “timbrology” in English; stamps in French are timbres.

He wanted a word that would convey the culture change that had come with the widespread introduction of postage stamps in Europe and the United States in the 1840s and ’50s. Herpin sought a word that would denote the monumental shift that stamps had brought on with the idea that once a letter-writer had purchased a stamp and affixed it, the letter would go through, period. No one would demand any more money.

Herpin reached to ancient Greek and concocted the word philatélie—in English, “philately,” from “philo,” denoting “loving” or “affinity for,” and “ateleia,” meaning, as he put it, “free of all charges of duties [when] affixed” to an envelope or a package.

It would have been Greek to the Greeks. “Unfortunately,” as the Scottish philatelist James Alexander Mackay wrote, “his knowledge of Greek was not as faultless as his logic. He wished to convey a love (philos) of things which signified that no tax (telos) had to be paid, e.g., a stamp denoting prepayment. Strictly speaking, therefore, the word should have been atelophily.”

Or perhaps “timbrophily,” a term mentioned by Stephen Satchell, a longtime collector who is an economist and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and J.F.W. Auld, a stamp auctioneer, after dismissing “philatelist” as describing “a lover of postmarks rather than a lover of stamps.”

Philatelists may feel passion for postmarks, but they are even more passionate about stamps. Herpin’s term— philately—has set the tone for stamp collecting ever since, at least in the mind of the general public: studious, dry, maybe boring, especially in Second Empire France, with racy Offenbach operettas, the Théâtre du Vaudeville and—four years after Herpin’s grumblings—the Folies Bergére. And later, much later, an American philatelic writer declared that a stamp was nothing but a tax receipt. What could be less thrilling than a tax receipt?

And stamps were also time-consuming—who knows how many countless hours Vaughan would have spent poring over albums—but then, they still are. In 2015, Yahoo reported that fantasy players spent an average of five hundred minutes a month creating dream-team rosters in football, baseball, or basketball on its site—only about forty-five minutes a day. To stamp collectors, that is no time at all. Surely teenage boys in the mid-to-1 ate nineteenth century had that much time to spend sifting through canceled letters in the hunt for the one-of-a-kind stamp. They were infected with collection-itis, even if they never stumbled across the one great stamp.

Vaughan was not looking for a megabuck payoff, but still the one-cent magenta proved to be hard to get rid of. He wanted money for more stamps and decided it had to go. He took it to Neil Ross McKinnon, who was well known in British Guiana, not only as the first mayor of New Amsterdam, an outlying town in British Guiana, but as an early philatelist. McKinnon turned him away, at least at first. McKinnon objected to the cut corners and grumbled that the stamp “appeared to be a bad specimen,” as the British Guiana Philatelic Journal put it.

Vaughan tried persuasion, telling McKinnon he wanted money for nicer stamps, an argument that apparently melted McKinnon’s resistance. “After some hesitation,” the Journal reported, “[McKinnon] said he would risk six shillings on it … duly impressing on [Vaughan] the great risk he was running in paying 6s.”

Maybe McKinnon really believed that he would be stuck with the homely stamp, that its value would sink to one or two shillings—or, worse, to nothing at all. Maybe he worried that he would feel foolish, that other collectors would make fun of him for buying something so obviously worthless.

Five years later, when McKinnon sold the best of his collection, he posted a profit of 800 percent.

Vaughan would live to nearly ninety and never lose interest in stamps. In the 1970s, W.A. Townsend and F.G. Howe, in their study of stamps of British Guiana, would write that Vaughan “rose to the top of the British Guiana Philatelic Society” and wrote “many accurate notes” for its journal. Coming from two famous British experts who prided themselves on exhaustive research, that was high praise indeed.

Townsend and Howe were exacting. Philately is exacting. It demands an eye and a memory for details, for the intricacies of designs, for tiny differences between one batch of stamps and another. No wonder philatelists prize mistakes—easy-to-spot mistakes like the Inverted Jenny, and subtler ones. In 1967, Guyana, then newly independent, reproduced the one-cent magenta on a five-cent commemorative that carried the words “the worlds rarest stamp.” The lack of an apostrophe earned the commemorative a place as a howler on a website called “Postage Stamp Design Errors.”

Stamp collectors have been mocked often enough—or belittled or disparaged—to have learned that, yes, it takes one to know one. “Devoted philatelists don’t go around announcing their predilection,” the British writer Simon Garfield wrote in 2008 in explaining why it was easier to tell his wife about his fling with another woman than to tell her about his thing with stamps. “Only fellow philatelists completely sympathize with the obsession. Socially [stamps] may embarrass me (‘You collect stamps? You? Who once followed The Clash on tour?’).”

But why? Why do stamp collectors collect? “Do we collect in order to touch the past and thereby escape the present, thus making collecting a form of nostalgia?” John Bryant, an English professor whose academic work centers on Herman Melville and the Transcendentalists, asked in the Handbook of American Popular Culture in 1989. “Do we collect because we want to know the world, or because we enjoy pretty things? Do we collect, quite simply, because the things, pretty or not … are begging to be collected?” Bryant did not answer those questions directly, but his biographical sketch in the first volume of that multivolume work answered another—what, exactly, do philatelists do? “Of an evening,” it said, “he will fiddle with a stamp collection that he has maintained since the age of ten.”

Many collectors started earlier than they could have started following punk bands. James Alexander Mackay claimed to be a Mozart of stamps, having discovered philately at age four. They know the euphoric highs. They also know there can be a dangerous progression beyond casual stamp collecting. Maybe they didn’t plan to spend the rest of their lives amassing stamps—it just happened. “It’s an obsession,” the Israeli billionaire Joseph D. Hackmey told me, explaining why he had spent so much time (thirty years) and so much money (tens of millions) gathering stamps from New Zealand—among them the only three-penny lilacs from 1862 known to exist.

New Zealand was not his only specialty. Hackmey also assembled a prize-winning collection of Ceylon stamps, and his collection of Romanian material expanded beyond stamps to include the single most expensive copy of a newspaper. For $1.1 million, he got what the later owners of the one-cent magenta never did: the newspaper that came with the stamp. Or, in the case of the November 11, 1858, issue of Zimbrul şi Vulturul that Hackmey acquired after outbidding the Romanian Ministry of Culture and National Patrimony, the stamps. Eight rare Moldavian “Bull’s Head” stamps were pasted across the top of the front page before the newspaper was mailed.

If it’s any comfort to philatelists, collection-itis is not confined to people with a passion for stamps. People collect anything and everything: baseball cards, Matchbox cars, Homer Simpson bobble-head figures, vintage lunch boxes. There was the dentist who collected incandescent light bulbs—sixty thousand of them, including the world’s biggest, a fifty-thousand-watter. There was the teetotaling nonsmoker who collected miniature liquor bottles and, from cigarette packs, Alberto Vargas pinups. And there was the funeral director whom the New York Times described as a “Giotto of Maryland” for carving the masterpieces in a duck-decoy museum. A series of books called “Pleasures and Treasures” in the 1960s covered everything from arms and armor to French porcelain. And stamps.

The definition of collectibles changed as fads and fashions came and went. But the reason people collect has not changed. “Collecting fills a hole in life,” Garfield wrote, “and gives it a semblance of meaning. When men get together to talk about their passions, we don’t just talk about what we love—our cars, our sports, our romantic yearnings—but also how these desires have cost us, and what we have lost. We try to regain what we cannot. We talk about the one that got away—the prized possessions— as if that would have made everything right.”

That’s Stamp World for you.

FIVE

£120

1878: Glasgow and London

N eil Ross McKinnon had snapped up much of his collection when “old” stamps from British Guiana were cheap. He probably figured that prices—which had risen somewhat in a “stamp rush” in the 1870s, as stamp collecting became more and more popular—would climb even faster as the years went by. The money must have seemed alluring, considering how low the prices had been for McKinnon and Vaughan and anyone else who had bought and held British Guiana stamps from the beginning: Vaughan remembered selling British Guianan cottonreels for £1, equivalent to about $5 in today’s currency. But those were cottonreels, and everyone knew that there were only so many cottonreels. There were other already-recognized rarities, and the race was on to locate them. Advertisements promising cash for stamps, any stamps, sent would-be philatelists scavenging “among private letters, in banks, merchants’ offices, government offices, etc., as opportunity offered, with the result that hundreds of the early issues were found,” Arthur D. Ferguson, a founder of the British Guiana Philatelic Society and the longtime editor of the British Guiana Philatelic Journal, reported nearly fifty years later. It wasn’t always the original owners who profited, and it wasn’t always committed collectors who were the treasure hunters. Unlike Vaughan, many had no legal claim to the stamps they snapped up and sold. Ferguson complained that some of the stamp hunting was done “without permission by clerks, office-boys, etc.”—who sold the stamps and pocketed the money.

McKinnon assembled what would have been an enviable collection of stamps from British Guiana, except that in the mid-1870s, there was nothing enviable about it: no one cared about a collection of stamps from British Guiana—not yet, anyway. Stamps from British Guiana were still too new, and British Guiana was too far from the mainstream, as it always had been. By 1878, McKinnon owned the five most precious stamps from British Guiana: the four known copies of the 1850 two-cent cottonreel on rose-colored paper, which was also a provisional, a stamp printed locally rather than in London— as well as the one-cent magenta (though, of course, he did not understand that it was unique and would someday be the most valuable stamp in the world).

Collectors who resisted the temptation to sell early certainly did well. A middle-aged London barrister with a preposterous double last name, William Hughes-Hughes, started a stamp collection in 1859 and became so immersed in philately that he joined the high-powered coterie that met on Saturday afternoons at the Rev. Francis John Stainforth’s rectory. It was the world’s first local stamp club, but when it came to collecting, stamps were not Stainforth’s only passion. He was also a conchologist (mollusks and shells) and assembled a large library of plays and poems by women, which is intriguing, because women were not allowed in the philatelic group. His catalogue—of course a consummate collector like Stainforth would catalogue his holdings—contains some six thousand entries, but judging by his “Wants” list,” there were nine hundred more items that he never acquired.

Historians of philately recognize Hughes-Hughes and Stainforth’s club as the one that eventually formed the Philatelic Society, London, the forerunner of the Royal Philatelic Society London, which David Redden visited with the one-cent magenta. Historians of Parliament remember Hughes-Hughes’s father as “one of the most thoroughly unpopular” MPs in the nineteenth century, mocked by Charles Dickens for “barking tremendously,” like a firefighter’s dog.

The younger Hughes-Hughes’s passion for stamps did not last. He stopped collecting in 1874, calculating that he had spent £69 on holdings that included one of the blue four-cent stamps from British Guiana that were probably printed at the Gazette at the same time as the one-cent magenta. But he was not ready to part with his collection. Twenty-two years later, when it was finally liquidated, it went for £3,000, or more than $441,000 in today’s dollars.

Stamps were also appreciating in British Guiana by then. In 1896, the same year in which Hughes-Hughes’s stamps were sold, a church asked members of the congregation to bring in old stamps. The church was in debt, and the minister wanted to pay off the mortgage. He hoped to raise money by selling the stamps to collectors. A woman rummaged around at home and discovered two early four-cent stamps, enough, she thought, to knock a few pounds off the church’s debt. The minister went to thank her, and asked if she had any other treasures. She said she did not, but handed the minister a basket with envelopes containing old bills and receipts. One caught the minister’s eye. It was addressed “Miss Rose, Blankenburg” and carried a pair of two-cent cottonreels.

Miss Rose was in the room, and when the minister said the envelope was worth a great deal, she exclaimed, “Thank God! I am at last able to give something worthwhile.” The minister sold her envelope for £200, all but putting the church in the black.

McKinnon, though, had decided to cash out long before then, and enlisted help from another Scottish expatriate in British Guiana, one who stood to inherit a considerable fortune back in Glasgow. Just as everyone who was anyone in Paris after World War I seemed to know Gerald and Sara Murphy, everyone who was anyone in British Guiana in the mid-1870s must have known Robert Wylie Hill. (He was apparently not related to Rowland Hill, who invented the postage stamp.)

Unlike expats in British Guiana who set their sights on the nineteenth-century sugar frontier and worked as managers on plantations with distinctly Scottish names like Glasgow or Edinburgh—or who found their way to government jobs, as Vaughan did when he grew up—Wylie Hill seemed to see his mission as only slightly different from Columbus’s. He wanted to go where few white men had gone—up the Amazon, into the rain forests, and he wanted to take the evidence back to Scotland and sell it. He was absolutely confident that there was a market back home in Scotland for stuffed birds from South America. Wylie Hill had returned to Glasgow by the late 1870s and had used his inheritance to build a department store, where he sold his birds.

For McKinnon, trying to dispose of the one-cent magenta, the problem was that it had not been discovered yet. It was not listed in any of the stamp catalogues. The philatelic experts in Britain had heard about other provisionals from British Guiana, including the blue four-cent stamps that were printed at the same time in the same place, but they knew nothing about the one-cent magenta. McKinnon had to bring it to their attention in a way that legitimized it. He realized that this was a job for someone else, someone who was as close to being an insider as there was—someone in Britain, of course, and someone who could serve as the one-cent magenta’s advocate and publicist. He had someone in mind, a man who was already an established authority in the nascent universe of philately, an expert who could weigh in on the one-cent magenta’s authenticity—and who, if he believed in the stamp and gave it his imprimatur, could spread the word. The only problem was that McKinnon did not know him, except by reputation. But McKinnon knew just who could put the one-cent magenta in front of him: Wylie Hill.

And so McKinnon had sent his five most precious stamps across the ocean to Wylie Hill in Glasgow with a request to get them to the renowned stamp expert Edward Loines Pemberton and, if Pemberton wanted them, to sell them to him.

It was a pragmatic choice. Pemberton was the coauthor of a groundbreaking work on philatelic forgeries, which were flooding the market and threatening the value of legitimate rarities. If Pemberton vouched for the one-cent magenta, collectors would believe it was neither a forgery nor a fake. Anyone who wanted to make the case that it was, say, a four-cent stamp that had been altered would have a hard time going against Pemberton.

Pemberton was a prodigy. Before stamp collecting was weighed down by “its ponderous monographs and its obese catalogues,” as the Philatelic Journal of Great Britain put it in 1922, there was Pemberton, an authority who spoke as if he had been present at the creation, and he pretty much was. He had caught the stamp bug when stamps were in their infancy and had “mastered every minute peculiarity,” according to The Philatelic Record, which was written and read by masters of those peculiarities. By the time he attended the very first stamp auction ever held in London—in 1872, when he was twenty-seven—Pemberton was an old-timer in the stamp business. As a mere teenager, he had been considered as much of an authority as “many others who were his seniors by nearly half a century!”

Forgers hated Pemberton, but collectors respected him as the coauthor of a groundbreaking work on forgeries. He happily did more than just name names. His Journal promised the “addresses of all ascertained dealers in forgeries.”

Pemberton had heard about the four-cent stamps from 1856 and had dismissed them as “purely provisional.” “Ship with motto in plain oblong lettered frame,” he wrote in The Stamp Collector’s Handbook, which he described as “a plain and strictly accurate list of postage stamps.”

But it was incomplete.

It arrived at Pemberton’s house in a package, a dowdy twenty-two-year-old stamp. But Pemberton recognized its historic significance, and pushed it into the spotlight with his eyes, his memory, and maybe a magnifying glass.

His tools were rudimentary. If he had a microscope, it was probably little more than a couple of lenses in a tube. If he had other tools that modern stamp collectors take for granted, they, too, were rudimentary—tongs, perhaps, to keep dust and sweat from his fingers from damaging the stamps he examined. He had his pick of what was available, and the Philatelic Journal of Great Britain sighed that “it [made] one’s mouth water” to think about the stamps that he got to see. “There are collectors who are just better at seeing things than others,” Ted Wilson, the registrar of the National Postal Museum in Washington, told me. “I’ve seen people look at things, and they’re able to see something that somebody who’s looked at it a hundred times didn’t see. You can tell the difference between people who are good and people who are incredible that way. He fell into the latter category. He had the eyes.” Somehow, Pemberton saw everything, remembered everything, before everything was in catalogues.

But Pemberton had another advantage in examining the one-cent magenta when he did. Wilson speculates that the stamp has faded with age and looked “significantly better” when Pemberton saw it than it does now. “He was in a better position to make a judgment than we would be today—if we didn’t have the fancy equipment we have,” he said.

Pemberton did not travel to the places that stamps came from. The mail brought them to him, directly or through intermediaries. When Wylie Hill sent him McKinnon’s stamps, Wylie Hill quoted a price of £110, or just over $26,000 in today’s dollars.

Pemberton, then thirty-three and already frail from rheumatic fever in his late twenties, looked over McKinnon’s collection and judged the one-cent magenta to be the real thing, an authentic stamp that the philatelic world had never seen. He wrote to Sir Edward Denny Bacon, another pillar of British philately, in November 1878 that “the lot included a ‘ONE cent, red, 1856!!!” When E.L. Pemberton talked, philatelists listened, and E.L. Pemberton was practically shouting.

If he had not ratified the one-cent magenta as he did— if Pemberton, the reigning expert on fakes, had ruled that it was bogus—it would have gone back to Wylie Hill. Perhaps Wylie Hill would have returned it to McKinnon with a note that began, “Sorry, old chum.” Or maybe Wylie Hill would not have bothered to send it back: “Sorry, old chum—I took the liberty of destroying the worthless and rather ugly one-cent magenta. I’m sure you will agree that I did what was best under the circumstances.”

As it was, Pemberton called the one-cent magenta “queer” and “a dreadfully poor copy.” But it was authentic. Pemberton never got around to writing out a detailed explanation of why he was sure it was real, but with his capital letters and exclamation points, he cemented the one-cent magenta’s place in history.

He cemented its place in history in another way: by not buying it.

All he had to do was to send Wylie Hill a check, perhaps only a deposit if he did not have the money in the bank. Pemberton was Pemberton, and Wylie Hill would have accommodated him. Instead, according to the Williamses, “for some reason Pemberton dallied.” He returned McKinnon’s stamps to Wylie Hill without making clear that he wanted them.

If he thought he still had the right of first refusal, he underestimated the wily Wylie Hill, who, “after waiting for some time in vain,” moved on. David Redden maintains that Hill was simply following McKinnon’s orders when he sent letters offering the collection to other stamp dealers, among them Thomas Ridpath of Liverpool, who hopped on a train to Glasgow, examined McKinnon’s stamps, borrowed the money to buy them, and caught a train home to Liverpool, all in twenty-four hours. Ridpath paid £120. Already the one-cent magenta’s price was climbing.

But while Ridpath was rushing off to Scotland, Pemberton changed his tune. Now he wanted the one-cent magenta.

Speedy as the British mail service was, Ridpath was not to be beaten. Pemberton sent along a check, but by the time it landed in Wylie Hill’s mailbox, it was too late. McKinnon’s stamps now belonged to Ridpath. The transaction could not be undone, not even for Pemberton.

Ever since, philatelists have wondered whether Ridpath understood the coup he had pulled off. Pemberton certainly did. He realized the opportunity he had missed.

Ridpath did not hold on to the one-cent magenta. Within days of his marathon trip to Glasgow, the stamp was off to Paris. Ridpath was confident that he could unload the strange little stamp for more than he had paid for it.

Like McKinnon, he had someone in mind —someone who, just by buying it, would make the one-cent magenta famous.

SIX

£150

1878: The Man in the Yachting Cap

L ate one afternoon in May 1886, three thousand members of the moneyed aristocracy in France—a thousand more than could have squeezed into the lavish and still fairly new home of the Opéra de Paris—strolled into a palace that had once belonged to the diplomat Talleyrand, who had made himself indispensable to regime after regime. Princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, viscounts and barons, the wedding guests passed under a balcony with sculptured lion’s heads and sauntered through some of the most opulent rooms in Paris. Wedding gifts poured in, too, for the occasion was a marriage, an arranged marriage that united two of Europe’s royal families. But it was “undoubtedly a love match,” the New York Times wrote, surprised that that thing called love had quickened the groom’s humdrum heart.

One of the presents was a stunning tiara commissioned by the bride’s father-in-law, King Luís I of Portugal, who was as popular in Lisbon for translating Hamlet and Othello as for handling the affairs of state. The Times noted that the bride’s father—“a tall, robust, powerful looking man” who had spent his thirties in the United States and had served under General George McClellan in the Union Army during the Civil War—was a published author in his own right: “The most important of his literary productions is his History of the Civil War in America, a large and exhaustive work.”

The bride, who carried a lovely wreath of orange blossoms, was “rather too tall,” the Times carped, but she had the look of royalty behind her lace veil: “It would not be easy to find more aristocratic looking hands or smaller, more shell-like ears than those of this princess.”

The one-cent magenta knew all about the wedding. It was close enough to hear the buzz of the crowd, the swish of the dresses, the airy sound of the orchestra. The one-cent magenta knew who flirted with whom, who got tipsy on the champagne, and who made a toast so inflammatory that Parliament said never again—a law passed the following week banned gatherings of that many nobles, for fear they would decide to overthrow the government.

The one-cent magenta knew all this because the palace, known as the Hôtel Matignon, where the wedding took place, had been the one-cent magenta’s home for eight years. Later on, the stamp’s neighbors on the Rue de Varenne, down from Les Invalides in the seventh arrondissement, would include Rodin, Rilke, and Edith Wharton.

The stamp’s owner was an eccentric aristocrat, though he had long since shed his many titles. He tolerated Paris, though he disliked the French and insisted that his heart was with “my beloved Austria and my dear Germany.” Philippe Arnold de la Renotiere von Ferrary bought any stamp that came on the market, it seemed. His huge collection even included any number of fakes, and he knew it. He patronized one dealer who not only trafficked in forgeries but printed ersatz stamps in a back room. Ferrary supposedly bought one that was printed while he waited in the front room. The ink was still a little wet when the stamp was brought out and he touched it, but he did not mind.

“I would sooner buy one hundred forgeries than miss that variety I could not find elsewhere,” Ferrary said. Collectors soon dubbed the forgeries he accumulated “Ferrarities.”

The one-cent magenta was the real thing. Ferrary was the stamp’s first owner who lived in a grand setting, who amassed an astonishing collection, and who kept philatelic experts on his payroll. There are other parallels between Ferrary and another, later owner: brief marriages that didn’t last, deep attachments to their mothers, passionately conservative views on politics and patriotism. At their deaths, the one-cent magenta was auctioned off with lawyers and executors looking on. Ferrary, though, did not kill anyone and did not die in prison. But that is getting far ahead of the story.

After Ferrary bought the one-cent magenta, it wasn’t seen again in public until 1922. That only added to its allure. Stamp collectors still wonder what the one-cent magenta looked like when Ferrary owned it: how bright was it the first time he saw it, bundled it up, put it on a shelf. Whether he had it recolored after Bacon described its surface as rubbed in 1891. How much it had faded by the time he died nearly forty years later. And how often he took it off the shelf, turned it over, studied the initials, held a magnifying glass over the smudgy type, and defended the cut corners. Surely he loved the cut corners. Ferrary was known to cut stamps off covers long after his advisers pointed out that no one did that anymore, that the fashion in philately was to save the whole envelope containing a rare stamp. Maybe he sliced the corners off the one-cent magenta. There is no way to know.

By all accounts, Ferrary was a reclusive man who let in only a few trusted friends. Charles J. Phillips, the philatelist who had owned the venerable London dealer Stanley Gibbons and Company since 1890, was “one of the few people privileged to have the run of the collection whenever desired.” The rest of the world had to imagine what the one-cent magenta looked like. As the stamp writer Alvin F. Harlow observed, “When a good stamp fell into his collection, it was spoken of as having gone to the graveyard”—it was not seen again, or so philatelists believed. Ferrary wrote little except for a couple of articles in philatelic journals when he was young and, when he was older, complaining letters to the editors of stamp magazines that used his royal titles. He or his assistants let Sir Edward Denny Bacon examine the stamp in Paris in 1891, and Bacon pulled out all the stops. If anyone had doubts after seeing Pemberton’s exclamation points, Bacon meant to settle the matter.

For his part, Ferrary was all about Ferrary: he knew that the one-cent magenta was spectacular—by most accounts, he had paid £150 for it—and he didn’t mind letting his friends know that he knew. He probably knew, too, that they would spread the stories about his collection. That would make it more valuable than if he allowed ordinary people to see it—the mystery would be gone— and he even turned down requests from people who were anything but ordinary. Ferrary supposedly said no to George V, who invited him to bring the best of his collection to London. Surely George V wanted to see the one-cent magenta. But Ferrary would not take his stamps across the Channel. Ferrary’s excuse was that he had promised his mother that his stamps would never leave the opulent surroundings of the Hotel Matignon. And they were opulent. The Hôtel Matignon set the standard on the supremely fashionable Rue de Varenne. In 1905, when Ferrary was in his fifties, the artist Eugène Atget photographed a fireplace there with a riot of candelabras on the mantel. The chandelier, the tall gilded clock, the floral-print slipcovers on the couches, the plasterwork on the walls—it was all so grand, and so big. Those three thousand wedding guests gossiped and dined and danced without angering the neighbors.

On her death two years after the wedding, Ferrary’s mother bequeathed the palace to Emperor Franz Joseph for use as the Austrian embassy. But not all of it. One wing was to be Ferrary’s, for the rest of his life, and his stamp business occupied three “philatelic rooms.” Stamp dealers who showed up with treasures to sell had to run a gauntlet—big watchdogs had the run of the courtyard and had to be tied up before visitors entered. Inside was a retinue, Ferrary’s philatelic secretaries and a business manager who put bundles of cash on nails in one room—every denomination up to a thousand francs, fifty thousand francs a week, week after week. Ferrary lived by the honor system. The sellers simply took what they were owed. And when Ferrary went shopping, the stamp-s hop clerks knew not to stand too close. They opened their albums and looked the other way. Ferrary turned the pages, removing the stamps he wanted and putting them in his pocket. Then he left, and the clerks would go through the albums, noting what stamps were missing. The boss sent an invoice. Ferrary’s people sent a check.

But maybe the one-cent magenta did not spend all its days in the palace. It is possible that Ferrary slipped the stamp out of the palace from time to time for a little show-and-tell. Ferrary didn’t advertise this, of course—why tempt the pickpockets of the world? But pickpockets who read a syndicated newspaper article one Sunday morning in 1906 probably wished they were within easy reach of Ferrary’s threadbare coat. Smoothly, invisibly, they could have slid their fingers into his pockets and stolen his treasures, because—without meaning to—the article portrayed him as the easiest of marks.

“Ferrary was inspecting an art collection,” the article reported, “when a large and handsome canvas that occupied a great portion of wall space was pointed out to him as the most valuable picture in the salon. ‘It is worth all of eighteen hundred pounds,’ ” he was told.

“‘Then it is not the most valuable picture here,’ replied Ferrary, and he produced a small card case from the depths of a pocket. Inside was a tiny piece of paper, which he carefully held up. ‘This,’ he continued, ‘is far more costly than your beautiful painting.’”

It was the one-cent magenta, which the article described as “a crude affair whose typographical appearance would not be endorsed by the humblest printer in all Christendom.” The reporter asked how much it was worth, for as is so often the case with newspaper articles, big money was the point. This article appeared under a nine-word headline: “Most Valuable Bit of Paper in the Whole World.”

“ ‘I prize it so highly,’ answered Ferrary, ‘that if you were this instant to offer me three thousand pounds for it, I would not take it.’ ” How much was £3,000 worth in 1906? The headline writer saved pickpockets the trouble of doing the pounds-to-dollars calculation. The secondary headline read, “Owner Would Not Take $15,000 For It.” That works out to at least $307,000 in today’s dollars.

Ferrary stored his stamps not in albums but in packets in cupboards in alphabetical order. No one knows how often Ferrary went to the section where he kept the one-cent magenta—or had someone reach there for him—and untied the packet from British Guiana. No one knows how often he marveled at the stamp. The implication is not often. There are accounts that some of the bundles in his stamp rooms were dusty, that no one touched them for years. This suggests a household that was not attended to. That cannot have been the case. Ferrary’s mother had been the richest woman in Europe. There was no Downton Abbey squeeze on the household staff. But perhaps Ferrary allowed no one in his quarters, even to clean.

Ferrary was named after King Louis Philippe of France, the “citizen king” undermined by the emerging industrial class. If Ferrary was born in 1848, as some accounts maintain, his namesake was out of power before he was out of diapers, and the Ferrary family was soon playing up to Napoleon III. And if Ferrary’s mother was wealthy, his father was almost as well off from holdings in old-fashioned banks and newfangled railroads in Europe and Latin America. His father also had a hand in financing the Suez Canal. The library in the palace contained shelves filled with leather-bound books. After Ferrary’s father died and his mother stepped inside the library for the first time, she discovered that the shelves did not contain the collected works of Montesquieu or Rousseau or Racine or Voltaire; they contained the collected works of her late husband. But his works were not filled with words. Each page of the volumes held a government bond—more than twelve million francs’ worth in all.

Ferrary hated his father, who, it turned out, wasn’t his father at all. In his twenties, Ferrary—and probably the rest of the household—heard Ferrary’s parents quarreling. The duke had apparently just learned that the duchess had had an affair with an Austrian army officer around the time Ferrary was born. Some years later, the officer, by then Count de La Renotiere von Kriegsfeld, adopted the middle-aged Ferrary. At the same time, the count adopted a second man, said to have been Ferrary’s half-brother.

Most accounts agree that Ferrary never married. But in 1893, the New-York Tribune told Ferrary’s story with a twist. On the same page as articles headlined “A Bride-Hunting Prince” and “From Mr. Greeley’s Pen,” it divulged that after renouncing his titles, Ferrary had found work as a tutor in mathematics “and lived modestly but honestly on a small income.” He may have moved to a Left Bank apartment for a while when he was in his twenties, but he had the money to be welcomed in the right Right Bank circles. And in one salon, the article revealed, he met a Russian princess who was “rich, beautiful and [possessed] all the attractions of the high-class Tartar.” It was love, the Tribune wrote, “and to please her, [Ferrary] laid claim to the parental millions.” The Russian emperor even awarded him a title: the Duke di Ferrari.

“The marriage took place,” the Tribune reported, “but it proved to be unhappy,” and Ferrary and the princess “decided to live apart.” It was the same Ferrary: “He has one hobby—the collection of postage stamps—and his collection is said by many experts to be the finest in Europe.”

Not only did Ferrary have some ambivalence about his wealth and titles, he did not look the part of an aristocratic Parisian. The stamp writer Fred J. Melville noted that Ferrary was “anything but spick and span, rather dowdy, in fact, apparently careless of his attire, except for the yachting cap he always affected.” The cap was emblazoned with three stars, and in stamp shops across Europe, the clerks snapped to attention when they saw it. One account has a worker whispering to a buddy, “Look sharp, for Gawd’s sake! Here comes Martell’s Three Star.” Apparently Ferrary’s cap had stars arranged like those on the label of bottles of Martell’s cognac.

Ferrary had taken up stamps as a distraction from the worries that preoccupied his parents. When he was ten years old and traveling in Germany, Ferrary was upset by bad news from the front: French forces under Napoleon III had beaten the Austrian army. This was when he first became intrigued by stamps. Ironically, considering the subject at hand, the Austrians lost the Battle of Magenta. (Ferrary had nothing to do with designating the stamp’s color as magenta. That had happened even before it left British Guiana.)

His mother approved of his hobby—she may have been the one to nudge him to start collecting. She paid for whatever caught his eye. By the time he was a teenager, he had encountered the Parisian dealer Pierre Mahe, and after years as a regular customer, Ferrary hired Mahe to oversee his holdings in 1874. Thomas Ridpath, who had bought the one-cent magenta from McKinnon in 1878, must have dealt with Mahé when he offered to sell it.

Ridpath sold him only the one stamp. No doubt Ferrary would have bought more. He bought the Australian collection of Sir Daniel Cooper, the governor of New South Wales, in the same year. A couple of years later, he bought a two-volume Japanese collection from Edward Denny Bacon. A couple of years after that, Ferrary bought much of the renowned Frederick Adolphus Philbrick collection for £8,000, as much as $12.1 million in today’s dollars. Mahé maintained that even without Philbrick’s British stamps, which were not included, this “made” the Ferrary collection. Later still Ferrary snapped up Baron Arthur de Rothschild’s collection. That brought to seven the number of Post Office Mauritius stamps that Ferrary owned. And in 1894, he acquired the Swedish Treskilling Yellow from 1857, another stamp discovered by a teenager hunting for treasure stamps among old family papers. The Stockholm dealer Heinrich Lichtenstein realized the mistake: the teenager’s three-skilling stamp was the color of an eight-skilling stamp. Like Louis Vernon Vaughan, the teenager walked away with a lot of money (for a teenager, anyway)—seven kronor, or about $223 in today’s currency.

By the early twentieth century, some philatelists tallied and toted and guessed that Ferrary had spent as much as $1.2 million on stamps (equivalent to $34.9 million today). But he did not like to see his name in the papers. “For years,” L.N. and Maurice Williams write, “the very name of Ferrary was spoken in philatelic circles, almost in a whisper, and reference in print to him and his stamps was usually in the form of ‘a Parisian collection.’” Those who knew, knew; those who did not, wondered.

Ferrary’s pro-German loyalty made his life complicated as World War I spread across Europe. Breaking his rule about not traveling with his stamps, Ferrary played the part of a rich man on the run, fleeing to neutral Switzerland, carrying along only a few stamp albums that held mostly Greek stamps. As the fighting continued, Ferrary managed to crisscross Europe in pursuit of stamps. He died in a taxi in Lausanne, on the way back to his hotel after trying to buy yet another stamp. He had a heart attack in the back seat.

Ferrary had spelled out the details of what was to happen to his stamp collection after he was gone. His will said it was all to go to Austria—specifically, to the Reichspost Museum in Berlin. The French would not hear of that. The French government seized the stamps in the Hôtel Matignon, and after several years of legal wrangling, interrupted by the necessary sorting and cataloguing, announced a sale. This was no one-day affair. There were so many stamps in the Ferrary collection that it took fourteen sales between 1921 and 1925 to auction them all. The one-cent magenta was not even included in the first sale.

When it finally went on the block, the catalogue described it in French: “GUYANE ANGLAISE. 1856. 1 c. noir sur carmin, catalogué chez Yvert et Tellier sous le no. 12 et sous le no. 23 dans le catalogue de Stanley Gibbons. C’est le seul exemplaire connu, obl.” The only known example.

But the one-cent magenta’s uniqueness was not why it set off a bidding war. Ferrary—secretive and obsessive, and the quintessential Mr. Big Spender—would have loved the caper that unfolded: the intrigue, the preposterousness and the money. Especially the money. The enormous bids made Ferrary look like the smartest stamp buyer in history, not just the most voracious. Suddenly, his purchase of the one-cent magenta looked like a bargain, for in a matter of minutes, it became all the more unaffordable.

The auction opened after an intriguing twist that John le Carré would have loved, the curious incident of the stamp men in the restaurant—an overheard conversation that tipped off one potential bidder about how much his main rival could spend. The two antagonists were seated within earshot of each other, although if the story is to be believed, Hugo Griebert, a London dealer, did not see Maurice Burrus, who was, like Ferrary, wealthy and willing to spend. Burrus, whose money came from a family tobacco business, had been the biggest individual buyer at the first Ferrary sale. He had bought a two-cent Hawaiian “Missionary” for $14,150, setting the record for a single lot at that initial auction.

Burrus might have wondered why the one-cent magenta was not on the block that first day. The philatelic writer Kent B. Stiles asked the question in a stamp journal, estimating that the one-cent magenta would sell for between $10,000 and $15,000 ($139,000 to $208,000 in today’s dollars). But he said that eyebrows had been raised by its absence: “Is that stamp still in the Ferrary collection? If so, have any other rarities been sold privately[?] If they have, who are the purchasers and where are those stamps now?” Stiles suspected the French government of strategizing, of taking a wait-and-see approach, of wanting to gauge the interest in the lesser treasures “before it placed the more desirable items … on the market.”

If that was the French strategy, it paid off quickly. “Everyone is asking in London when the unique ‘Ferrarity’ will be offered,” the philatelic writer Fred J. Melville observed in Stamp Collecting magazine amid suspicion that the one-cent magenta really was that kind of a Ferrarity: “The old story that it’s a defective four-cent” was making the rounds. Gerard Gilbert, the Parisian expert commissioned to catalogue the Ferrary collection, had examined it, but Melville noted that “until M. Gilbert has decided that it is good, the stamp may not be put to the test” of an auction.

The test came eight months later, shortly after the scene in the restaurant. Griebert was the chatterbox, and Burrus said later that he could hear every word of the story Griebert told at his table. And what a cynical story it was: Griebert blithely said his client was an American who had given him a nearly unlimited bid—a bid with the then unheard-of maximum of $60,000 (equivalent to just over $850,000 in today’s dollars). That was all Burrus needed to know, but Griebert could not stop yammering away. He announced that he himself “did not believe” in the one-cent magenta—he had doubts about its authenticity and suspected it was a four-cent provisional that had been altered and fobbed off on the philatelic world.

By coincidence, that was exactly what Burrus had deduced. He maintained—even as late as 1951—that the one-cent had been created by rubbing out the F in “FOUR” and the S in “CENTS”—and transforming the UR after the O to NE.

Burrus decided to show up Griebert. He thought that the game he had in mind would be amusing. It would also be expensive, but he knew that Griebert’s client had the money. Never mind that the big names of philately had vouched for the one-cent magenta, starting with Pemberton’s simple declaration nearly more than forty years earlier. The eminent British philatelists W.A. Townsend and F.G. Howe noted that the Mahés—“father and son,” both of whom worked for Ferrary over the years—had “accepted and approved it, as [had] Sir Edward [Denny] Bacon.” Burrus still wanted to make Griebert’s client pay until it hurt.

Lot No. 295 opened at 50,000 francs, and the price climbed in 5,000-franc increments to 200,000, with Burrus matching Griebert at every step, even as other bidders dropped out, unwilling or unable to risk so much money. The denouement was exactly what Burrus imagined. At 295,000 francs, Griebert indicated that he would go to 300,000. Burrus decided to end his charade, and dropped out. Griebert’s total, once the French sales tax was added, was 352,500 francs, or $32,500 ($459,000 in today’s dollars).

Redden’s pre-sale catalogue in 2014 dismissed the tale of the overheard conversation because, among other things, Burrus had acquired another important item from the early days in British Guiana at one of the earlier Ferrary sales, an 1851 two-cent cottonreel pair on cover that went for $19,000. But Burrus turned the one-cent magenta into the single most expensive item in any of the Ferrary sales, and he had spent not a penny on it. That distinction went to Griebert’s American client, the richest man in Utica, New York—Arthur Hind.

SEVEN

$32,500

1922: The Plutocrat with the Cigar

I n the story about the plutocrat and the cigar, the plutocrat was Arthur Hind, and the cigar was a Pennsylvania stogie, not a hand-rolled Cuban Cohiba. Hind looked like a down-market Daddy Warbucks— fleshier and not so worldly. Daddy Warbucks, according to no less an authority than Little Orphan Annie, had ten zillion dollars. Hind, according to no less an authority than Hind himself, had at least $7 million, and he bought a lot of stamps—thousands and thousands of stamps, so many he could not keep track of them all—before the Depression knocked his net worth down to only a million or so. A careful inventory of his stamp holdings ran to hundreds of pages, as thick as a telephone book. But the plain little one-cent magenta was his most important purchase, for it was the one that brought him what he cherished the most: fame.

Like Daddy Warbucks, Hind was an industrialist, self-centered and self-important. He was a fussy dresser, as one might expect of a multimillionaire in the fabric business. But he remained puzzlingly rough around the edges. There he stands in a fine-looking suit, a blank expression on his wide face as the camera snaps the photograph, but one trouser leg is noticeably shorter than the other. Surely he could have found a competent tailor.

Hind had been born in England, and like the very real Andrew Carnegie before him, had struggled and sweated in a textile mill when he was barely beyond grade school. And like Carnegie, who was only five feet tall, Hind was unusually short. Anyone who asked about Hind would have been told that when he was not quite sixty, he had taken up with a woman who was less than half his age and that they lived in upstate New York, far from the spotlights and celebrities—so far away that the stamp expert Kent B. Stiles commented that Hind “was never publicly identified with philately” until he bought the one-cent magenta.

Once he had it, though, he lived for the attention it brought him. Hind capitalized on the one-cent magenta the way a politician would, but for Hind it was an impolitic move. Philatelists do not promote themselves with souvenir cards. His carried a reproduction of the prize and a braggart’s caption: “The most valuable postage stamp in the world. The only known copy of the British Guiana one cent.” As if that were not enough—as if he had done anything more than spend extravagantly—he put his signature on the card.

The story about the second stamp and the cigar surfaced in a Virginia stamp magazine in 1938, five years after Hind’s death. The claim, in a long letter to the editor, was straightforward: “I had one too!”

The letter writer said he had been a cabin boy on a steamship that sailed to British Guiana from time to time. On a trip years before, he had bought “a packet of old local letters, some bills and receipts of a real old man” who was a relative of a drinking buddy. The purchase “cost me a few rums,” he wrote. “I mounted the stamps in an album I made myself, and that was that”—until he read about the Ferrary sale. “I said to myself, ‘D--- if I don’t think I’ve got its twin!’”

The man described driving to Utica and, after calling Hind on the telephone, finding his way to Hind’s house. He took out his stamp album and handed it to Hind, who grabbed his magnifying glass. “He went over to a place like a vault built into the wall of that room and got out his stamp, his one-cent Guiana. They were as alike as peas.” There were only two differences: the original postmaster’s signature on his stamp had more of a flourish than the signature on Hind’s, and his stamp had a slight tear. (He did not say whether his also had clipped corners.)

Hind “looked at me, and you could hear my heart thumping,” the man wrote, “and I guess he heard his, he was that still with excitement.”

“Well?” Hind asked.

The man replied: “One of us has to own both, that’s the way I figured it.” The letter writer named a price he was willing to pay Hind—“a big sum,” but exactly how much, he did not say.

Hind said, “If it’s worth that to you, it’s worth twice to me”—but insisted on secrecy: “Not even my secretary must know.” Hind promised to pay in cash—“I’d rather not give a check”—and directed the owner to return the following day to complete the deal. Even with a fireproof safe within reach, Hind apparently did not keep that much money around.

The man stuck to the schedule Hind prescribed and showed up the next day, dreaming about life after surrendering the stamp and fretting about the money he would walk away with. He feared he would be robbed on the street as he left.

But first he had to close the deal. Hind took the man’s stamp. “He held it in his hand and compared it with his again,” the man wrote. “Then he put his away.” Hind handed the man the money and offered him a cigar—“I put it in my pocket; I don’t smoke, but I wanted to keep it.”

Hind lit one for himself. Hind “looked at my stamp again,” and then did the one thing the man had not imagined. Hind touched the stamp he had just acquired to the flame of the match he had just struck. The man tried to grab the burning stamp but it was too late, and Hind knew it. He smiled mischievously and said, “There’s only one magenta one-cent Guiana.”

So what if the story is too good to be true. It presented Hind as the stamp world saw him, with his devil-may-care extravagance, and it bared the resentment that collectors harbored against him. “He had more money than knowledge of stamps,” Sir John Wilson, the British expert who was Keeper of the Royal Philatelic Collection from 1938 to 1969, wrote in the 1950s. “Where he was advised that a stamp was sufficiently rare and sensational, he would pay almost any price for it.” No doubt some philatelists snickered at the mention of Hind’s name. Hind must have known. He himself repeated a story he said had originated with a British clergyman during an “anti-philatelic outburst.” The minister imagined the dialogue between Hind and Saint Peter at the gate of heaven.

“I crave admittance,” Hind announced.

“Have you fed the poor, visited the sick, relieved distress?” Peter asked.

“No,” Hind replied, “I really hadn’t time, but I have a one-cent British Guiana stamp in a greaseproof envelope, for which I paid £7,000. Even His Majesty the King of Great Britain personally congratulated me upon [my] acquiring it. Would you like to see it?”

“Such tiny fragments will readily burn in hell,” Peter declared, slamming shut the gate.

And there were other stories about Hind. “The difficulty in showing stamps to Hind was that he always thought he had something better,” Wilson wrote in a passage about Hind’s pride at one-upping King George V. He damned Hind even more by implying Hind did not understand the differences between similar stamps in his own collection—differences that mattered to collectors.

Hind did not care. The author Alvin F. Harlow described him as “headstrong” and a reckless buyer, and the philatelic historian Stanley M. Bierman called him “opinionated, cynical and strong-minded.” For his part, Hind could bristle with arrogance, as was apparent in an article he wrote for the catalogue of an international exhibition in Australia: “The unfortunate side of being prominent in stamps is that so many of the correspondents who have no knowledge whatsoever about stamps or their value, must be disappointed when not receiving replies to their simple but ignorant questions.”

Some philatelists disdained Hind for buying, some for buying indiscriminately, like Ferrary. But the Ferrary of America was no Ferrary. Hind was more like William P. Brown, a New York coin dealer who began trading stamps around 1860, when philately was beginning to catch on with the public. “[A]s [Brown] had no knowledge of market values or rarity[,] he was guided by instinct,” L.N. and Maurice Williams wrote. The stamps Brown felt were worth featuring in his shop “he fixed onto the boards alongside his coins—with the nail through the middle of each stamp!”

Hind did not nail his stamps in place, and he did not nail cash to the wall for dealers, the way Ferrary did. But neither did he assemble his collections patiently, one important stamp at a time. Like Ferrary, he snapped up whole collections that others had put together. He shelled out $15,000 for a complete collection of Hawaii and $63,000 for a highly regarded collection of France. Shortly before he bought the one-cent magenta, he spent $50,000 to acquire the one- and two-penny Mauritius stamps.

Hind glued many of his stamps in stamp albums, all but ruining them forever. Some stamps he affixed to the pages with adhesive bandages. A deep student of philately would have known better than to risk damage to the stamps, but as the prestigious London Philatelist curtly observed, “We do not think Mr. Hind ever claimed to be a deep student of philately.” Hind simply plunged in, for he had so much to glue down. By the time Hugo Griebert pocketed the one-cent magenta for him at the Ferrary sale, Hind owned three or four of the world’s most valuable stamps, including a second pair of the famed Mauritius— the so-called Bordeaux Cover. It bore the orange one-penny and the blue two-pence Post Office Mauritius stamps and was described by the French dealer Roger Calves as “la pièce de resistance de toute la philatélie.”

Even A.J. Sefi, a famous British stamp dealer who was friendly with Hind, seemed to damn Hind with faint praise. Sefi—a distant cousin of Michael Sefi, the keeper of the queen’s collection whom Redden visited in 2014— maintained that Hind paid too much for the Mauritius cover. A.J. Sefi said he and Percival Loines Pemberton (the son of Edward Loines Pemberton, who had not been fast enough with his check in 1878) had gone to Paris to buy it months before Hind did. Sefi said they decided not to go through with the deal because the price was too high and one of the stamps showed some slight damage.

Sefi went on to indict Hind’s approach to collecting, faulting Hind for remaining an across-the-board generalist rather than limiting himself to stamps from only one or two places. “Collecting, as he did, the whole world,” Sefi wrote in The Philatelic Journal of Great Britain, “it was impossible for him to devote the hours of study to any one particular country that would have been possible had he been a ‘one-country’ man, as are so many of our great philatelists.” Sefi did defend Hind against criticism that he was “a wealthy man just accumulating vast quantities of the rarest obtainable stamps for the pure joy of possession … Hind was a much more knowledgeable buyer than the world gave him credit for,” Sefi wrote, and he “took the greatest interest and care in every one of his purchases.”

Sefi knew Hind’s habits because he had visited Hind in Utica. “Wrapped in a voluminous dressing-gown,” Sefi wrote, “he would spend the entire day in his simple study, working upon his collection, the whole of which was immediately available a few steps away, in the strong room built into the wall just before where he sat.” Hind put in long hours: “I remember one day that we never left the room from nine thirty in the morning until tea time, lunch, as was his wont, consisting of a few sandwiches as we worked.”

The one-cent magenta escaped the glue and the adhesive tape because Hind kept it in a cellophane envelope— and at least once, he forgot where he had stashed the envelope.

Hind was unusual among philatelists: he came to it late in life. He had not collected stamps as a boy. There wasn’t time. A seventh-grade dropout, he had gone to work young. He went on to make a fortune in imitation furs and seat covers for automobiles, but he was a hardly a conventional capitalist. From his late forties on, he spent much of his time traveling the world and living large, “a thrifty, hard-headed, meticulous although sometime vacation-minded businessman,” as one New York historian remembered him. Hind was known to send telegrams to his home office outside Utica with disarmingly relaxed-sounding accounts of what he was up to: “Might do some business in Calcutta. Things dull in Johannesburg.”

His fortune soared, thanks to a straightforward formula: always be the low-cost producer, even in bad times. But his was not the Horatio Alger story it appeared to be. The mill in Yorkshire in which he started out belonged to his family; he quit school because business had soured and he was needed at the mill. He worked his way up from the factory floor, and by the time he was seventeen, he was the firm’s rainmaker, bringing in new business.

Hind moved to the United States in 1890, the year he turned 34, because of protectionist tariffs. Republicans had championed such tariffs since the Civil War. The latest round carried the name of William McKinley, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a Republican congressman from Ohio, the state where Firestone, Goodrich, and Rockefeller had gotten their starts. In Washington, as one biographer noted, McKinley was more often a mediator than a gladiator, and he assumed that the most punishing tariffs in his bill would be reduced by a House-Senate conference committee. The committee let them stand. Hardline protectionism eventually boomeranged on the Republicans, but if McKinley was oblivious to the connection between tariffs and the accumulation of wealth in the Gilded Age, Hind was not. From across the Atlantic, he had seen possibilities. Congress might make laws abridging the rights of foreign firms to profit from their exports, but Congress would never impose limits on American manufacturers. So Hind set out to become an American manufacturer.

He did it the way he would later make himself a stamp collector. He bought his way in.

He decided to move the family company’s “plush” division—the unit that made velvet-like fabric from worsted yarn—to the United States, machinery, workers and all. The only thing he needed was a mill. With his checkbook in his pocket, Hind and H.B. Harrison, who handled the finishing and dyeing of Hind’s fabrics in England, went shopping.

Together they placed advertisements in newspapers and scouted failing factories that had “for sale” signs out. He and Harrison went as far as Hudson, New York, once a booming port city that later became infamous as “the little town with the big red-light district.” There they negotiated for a building they thought would do. But before the contract had been drawn up, Hind and Harrison decided to go sightseeing—specifically, to Niagara Falls— and before they departed, the one and only reply to their “factory wanted” advertisements reached them. It was from Clark Mills, New York, “a place,” in the words of the stamp dealer Charles J. Phillips, “they would never have considered if they had not planned this trip” to Niagara Falls. They put Clark Mills on the itinerary as the first stop. Phillips did not say whether they made it to Niagara Falls.

Hind liked the empty factory building in Clark Mills, a “virtual ghost town” where hard times had left “vacant houses pockmarked with broken windows.” He wanted the deal done fast. He stayed up all night in his hotel room, poring over documents that had to be signed to make the mill theirs. Then he sailed back to England to export the company, returning a few months later on the SS Majestic with five employees, the first of hundreds he brought over.

Clark Mills immediately became a company town, but the Boss complained that there was too little to do there after the closing whistle had sounded in the afternoon. He heard the call of the city—not the big city but the one nine miles away, Utica, the one that the historian Edmund Morris described as little more than a “shabby canal town.” Hind took his money there, eventually purchasing a hotel and a parking garage. He also picked up a stake in a golf course that was soon rechristened “Arhipaca.” People wondered if it was an Indian name. It was not. It was the first two letters of his first and last name and the first two letters of the first and last names of Hind’s partner in the deal, Patrick Casey.

By Utica’s standards, Hind was fabulously rich and, according to the stamp historian Bierman, “never took much advice.” But he took Harrison’s advice when Harrison urged him to take up the pursuits of the rich. It was Harrison who persuaded him to try philately.

Harrison had heard that a collection was available right there in Utica. Hind snapped it up and thus became the owner of twelve thousand stamps. The collection had belonged to a doctor, presumably a pillar of the community in Utica, something Hind aspired to be. “Despite his great wealth,” Bierman wrote, “he seemed basically insecure, and overcompensated for his presumed shortcomings by grandiose acquisitions as if to justify his raison d’être.”

Hind’s insecurity was on display almost as soon as he completed his most grandiose acquisition. Less than a year after Hind brought the one-cent magenta to the United States following the Ferrary sale, he carried it back to Europe. The occasion was a stamp exhibition in London in 1923. It was probably the first and only time the stamp was seen by the philatelist-king, George V. Sir Edward Denny Bacon, the king’s secretary for stamps, reported that George “didn’t want a cripple in his collection,” meaning the stamp held no appeal because of its cut corners. Sir John Wilson echoed that idea in his history of the royal stamp collection: “While [George V] acknowledged its interest and rarity, he regarded it as too poor a specimen to be worth anything like the figure which it [had] realized” in the Ferrary sale.

But when Hind and about a hundred other philatelists called at Buckingham Palace, Hind “repeatedly pointed out to his gracious host”—the king—“that his own collection was superior in rarities to the Royal Collection,” Bierman wrote. “When shown the king’s Post Office Mauritius, Hind was quick to mention that he had a better set.” Still, the king accepted one of Hind’s cards with the image of the one-cent magenta.

Hind was no more diplomatic on a trip to the Collectors Club in Manhattan in 1923. The club’s magazine reported that the scheduled events—a dinner at a fancy hotel and a talk by Hind, who had promised to show part of his collection—broke the club’s attendance records and brought together “a veritable Who’s Who among the leading United States specialists.” The Collectors Club counted among its members most of the boldface names of philately, including the dealer and auctioneer J.C. Morgenthau, who had sold Hind some of his Mauritius holdings, and Theodore E. Steinway, the son of one of the sons in Steinway & Sons, the piano company.

But Hind said not one word at his “talk.” The club’s magazine played the apologist. “The fact is that it was hardly necessary for Mr. Hind to do any talking,” it said. “His stamps were there to speak for themselves.”

He pulled three albums from a satchel. One was filled with Confederate stamps.

The collectors took issue, however politely, with Hind’s glued-down, adhesive-bound stamp albums. The magazine wrote “the mounting is not terribly attractive.” But “this is only a temporary condition, as Mr. Hind is shortly to have the collections remounted in better albums.”

Thanksgiving Day 1926 should have been the happiest of days for Hind, who had turned seventy earlier in the year. It was the day he married Ann Leeta McMahon. She wore a dress made of dark-green velvet—no doubt the finest that Hind’s mill could produce—and carried an orchid. The small bungalow in which the ceremony was held was decorated with chrysanthemums and lilacs. The Reverend Philip Smead Bird, a Presbyterian minister, officiated.

The newspapers did not mention some intriguing details. One was that the groom had an affectionate nickname for the bride—Bob, although when I ran across a mention of “Bob” in a surrogate court file, I wondered if the judge or the stenographer had misunderstood something gruffer and more colloquial, like “Bub.” Another detail was whether the ceremony was a sham. The couple had been living together for years, sometimes traveling as husband and wife. On a passport application she filled out in 1925, she wrote that she had married Hind two years before.

Ann was the daughter of a harness maker who went to work in a textile mill—not Hind’s—as the horse-and-buggy days disappeared in rear-view mirrors. It is not clear how she met Hind. David Redden’s first question to me, in a conversation months after the auction of the one-cent magenta and after I had begun reading up on Hind, was unrestrained: was she a showgirl? If she was, that occupation did not appear in census records. One listed her as an attendant in a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York when she was in her early twenties, some years before she took up with Hind.

“She was the girl he escorted around town,” Richard L. Williams, the current historian for the Town of Kirkland, New York—which now includes Clark Mills— told me. But for years Hind had escorted her far beyond Utica. She had signed a second passport application in 1925 “Leeta Ann Hind” (and had written that her stops on an upcoming trip would include “Maderia, France,” suggesting that spelling and geography were not strengths). It was the same name she had used ten years before, when they boarded the SS Cartago for the trip through the Panama Canal and on to New Orleans. She was Mrs. Hind again when they boarded a ship in Yokohama, Japan, in 1917. The passenger manifest listed her as married; her name appeared below Hind’s, and he paid for more than her ticket. Along the way, Hind bought her a strand of pearls that year for $15,000 (equivalent to $278,000 in today’s dollars). When they were sold at an auction in the 1940s, one bidder said, “He was a better philatelist than he was a jeweler.”

She registered as Leeta A. Hind in 1918, when they sailed from New York to San Juan on the SS Brazos, promoted by its owners as “specially built for tropical travel.” Again, she affirmed that they were married. But in 1919 in Liverpool, in the country whose citizenship Hind had renounced after moving to Clark Mills, she boarded the SS Carmania as Leeta A. McMahon, using her first husband’s name. She was Passenger No. 25, several lines below Hind in alphabetical order on the manifest, but still listed herself as McMahon’s widow on a passport application.

Through all of this, Hind worked on his stamps, but his interest in philately faded after they finally married. He said there was nothing more to collect. In 1928, when the stock market was roaring, he put a part of his collection on the market, but not the one-cent magenta. He wanted half a million dollars for much of the collection ($6.9 million in today’s dollars). He turned down an offer for $480,000.

Hind’s timing was terrible, but before long, he had things on his mind other than stocks and bonds that were worthless after the crash. By their fourth official anniversary—Thanksgiving in 1930—he apparently had had it with Ann. He more or less disinherited her for what he said were infidelities. He never got around to divorcing her, but he did revise his will. He left her their house, and in nine lines of tiny type, listed the possessions she was to have after he was gone, from jewelry and clothes to furniture, silverware, and “bric-brac.” He also spelled out what she was not to have: “My stamp collection.” It was “expressly excluded.”

Leaving her the “dwelling” was generous of Hind. The little bungalow had been hers to begin with, from her first marriage. But there was one possession that she was determined to have, willed or not.

EIGHT

$40,000

1940: The Angry Widow, Macy’s, and the Other Plutocrat

A rthur Hind died in March 1933 believing the one-cent magenta was in a vault at his bank in Utica. He had moved his stamp collection there several years before—most of it, anyway. But his executors, officials of the very same bank, did not find the one-cent magenta when they conducted an inventory. They searched frantically, checking and rechecking the albums and envelopes in the vault. Finally they turned their attention to the bungalow he and Mrs. Hind had shared. There, in Hind’s fireproof safe or in a drawer of his desk, was the stamp. It had been sent back from a stamp exhibition in late 1932, while Hind was still alive, and was still in the registered-mail envelope in which it had been returned. Apparently Hind had forgotten to forward it to the bank.

Of course Mrs. Hind claimed it. It was her lottery ticket, if she could just cash it in.

To do that, Mrs. Hind, the one person Hind did not want to have the one-cent magenta, would have to do the one thing that was not possible in the 1930s: sell it.

Hind had tried and failed to sell some of his stamp holdings. In 1931, a disastrous year that began with the Dow Jones industrial average at 169 and ended with the Dow at 74, Hind showed his contrarian side, or perhaps his delusional side. He raised the price from $500,000 to $600,000. There were no takers.

Mrs. Hind did not have the whole collection to sell. She did not have her husband’s Post Office Mauritius stamps, his Inverted Jennies, or his Confederates, and she did not demand them. She could really go after only one stamp, the one found in her home. It just happened to be the most valuable single item her husband had owned, the one-cent magenta.

First, though, she had to establish ownership, which meant tangling with Hind’s executors. She staked her claim to the stamp on a tale that seemed improbable, considering the explicitness of Hind’s will. There was no question that Hind had lavished gifts on Mrs. Hind over the years. The surrogate’s court mentioned a necklace that had cost Hind $25,000, as well as a $6,000 mink coat, a $5,000 platinum watch with diamonds, and the two cars, both Pierce-Arrows. Hind had paid $6,000 for one and $4,800 for the other. But she asserted that the one-cent magenta had also been a gift from Hind.

She also claimed a third of the remainder of Hind’s estate under a recently enacted state law that allowed widows to do so. Hind’s lawyer had tried to preempt such a challenge with a clause in the will. The new law was intended to empower women whose husbands had blindly left everything to the children. But it applied equally to widows from marriages gone bad.

She did not admit to friction in the marriage. She told a tale of comfortable domesticity, of a couple who were relaxed and easygoing around the house. She said she herself had taken the stamp out of the vault in December 1931 because he needed it. He had to mail it to London for display at a stamp show. Soon after the stamp was sent back in February 1932 and returned to its place in the safe, she made her move.

“Arthur Hind was sitting in his study,” a surrogate’s judge wrote later in summarizing her account. Hind’s safe was in the next room. Mrs. Hind knew the combination and dialed it in. She took out the one-cent magenta, carried it to the table where Hind was working and placed it in front of him. “Hind turned and observed the stamp,” the judge wrote. “He said to her in substance, ‘Bob’”—the judge duly noted that this was Hind’s pet name for his wife—“‘ do you know the worth of that stamp and would you appreciate it if I gave it to you?’” Yes and yes, Mrs. Hind said. Hind said the four words she wanted to hear: “You may have it.” The judge said that Hind “turned to the regular work in which he was engaged at the moment” and that Mrs. Hind put the stamp back in the safe. It was just another day around the house.

Now it was Mrs. Hind who took the stamp out of the safe from time to time and looked at it, the way Hind had done before his interest in philately faded. Or so she said.

By then, Hind was an old man. He was in his late seventies. He had lived nearly twenty years longer than the national average. A lesser man—less wealthy, less determined—would have retired to a rocking chair. Hind apparently still saw himself as a man on the go. In December of that year, Hind signed a six-month lease on a house in Miami Beach. He came down with pneumonia in February 1933 and died on March 1.

The funeral was held at the bungalow in Utica; the honorary pallbearers “were all prominent Utica men and old friends of Arthur’s,” the stamp dealer Charles J. Phillips wrote. There were eulogies by executives and employees of Hind’s company and by his bankers.

Mrs. Hind was not terribly convincing as a grieving widow. Her next husband was the man who sold her the tombstone for Hind’s grave. Pascal Costa Scala was thirty. She was forty-five.

Scala was a “well-known young Utican,” one of the newspapers wrote, although exactly what was meant by that phrase was not explained. Scala was definitely a local. He had grown up a couple of miles from Mrs. Hind’s bungalow. Across the street from his family’s tenement, home to Pascal and his brothers and sisters, was a funeral home run by a relative. Another relative ran a meat-packing business (and would tangle with Ann over a $20,000 loan during the Depression). A 1925 state census listed Scala’s occupation as “auto salesman,” but he had given that up by the time the next census-taker made the rounds. The 1930 federal census had him selling “monuments.”

They kept their relationship secret while Mrs. Hind parried with Hind’s executors and relatives, but tongues in Utica must have been wagging, especially if whispers had escaped that they had married in Pennsylvania just months after Hind’s death. The news did not make the papers until later, after she had settled with Hind’s heirs in Britain—and kept the one-cent magenta.

She sent the stamp to London, where the experts at the Royal Philatelic Society examined it and pronounced it genuine. She consigned it for an auction in London in October 1935, with a reserve—a minimum selling price— of $42,500, or at least $590,000 in 2016 dollars. The bidding opened at £3,500 ($16,000) and topped out at £7,500, $4,500 short of the threshold. The stamp was withdrawn without being sold, disappointing a Pemberton yet again. The final bid came from Percy Loines Pemberton, perhaps to avenge his father, Edward Loines Pemberton, who had declared the stamp genuine but had been late with his check in 1878.

Back in the United States, Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green was prepared to pay $40,000 for the one-cent magenta. The New York Times reported that Green would have, “had he lived a month longer.” Green was an eccentric multimillionaire in his late sixties who, like Hind, bought everything in sight. He was the genial counterpoint to his mother, Hetty Green, who was known as the “Witch of Wall Street”—famous for her success, infamous for her stinginess, her pettiness, her nastiness. But his death in 1936 dashed the deal for the one-cent magenta. Later the Times said Mrs. Hind turned down another $40,000 offer, this time from a British collector. Like Hind in 1931, she then raised the price. She insisted she would not sell for less than $50,000. In 1938, she turned to another stamp dealer, Ernest G. Jarvis, who set a more realistic price of $37,500. Still it did not sell.

She had steadily increased the insurance coverage of the stamp over the years, eventually valuing the stamp at $48,800. But she had no passion for stamps, and probably no patience for them, either. “She has none of the reverence for the stamp that collectors feel for [the one-cent magenta],” a reporter observed, noting the irony of her claim on it: “A woman who never collected anything in her life owns a stamp that makes stamp collectors shiver in awe.” She did not express awe or affection for her most valuable possession. She merely said it was “terribly homely.” She tried to rid herself of the stamp, but not at a loss. She turned down offers ranging from $25,000 to $38,000 in 1940 before she entrusted the stamp to a retailer that was bigger and more “Barnumesque” than any that had handled the stamp before—Macy’s. Macy’s had a stamp department in those days (as did its rival, Gimbel’s), and promised exposure.

The promises came from Finbar B. Kenny, the precocious—he was in his twenties at the time—manager of Macy’s stamp department. He became the stamp’s guardian and promoter. Mrs. Hind became the stamp’s escort. He arranged for the one-cent magenta to go to the World’s Fair. She dressed the part, in a fur jacket, and was photographed looking at the one-cent magenta. In newspapers that did not print color photographs, caption writers had to explain: “That little black spot on the table [in front of Mrs. Hind] is worth $50,000.”

Not quite. When she finally sold it, soon after her appearance at the World’s Fair, the check was for less than that. The New York Times said she got only $40,000. But the auction catalogue for a later sale said she pocketed $45,000.

Mrs. Hind’s marriage to Scala lasted nine years. This time, apparently, it was Mrs. Scala who was the wronged spouse. The judge who handled the case set two conditions. One was that Mrs. Scala could call herself Ann Hind again. The other was that she was free to remarry, but her ex-husband was not. The judge said that Scala was to seek the court’s permission if he wanted to marry while Mrs. Hind was still alive. Nothing in the record explained what Scala had done to prompt such an unusual requirement.

Mrs. Hind died of heart disease in 1945 at age fifty-seven. Scala returned to court the following year, seeking to have the divorce set aside. His lawyer said Mrs. Scala had “forgiven and condoned the acts of her husband and had done so before the decree had become final.” The judge turned him down but said he could file suit against his ex-wife’s estate. He did, and settled for $6,500.

Finbar B. Kenny, the manager of Macy’s stamp department, arranged the deal for Mrs. Hind. Her sister said Mrs. Hind never knew who bought it. If Mrs. Hind did not know who the new owner was, neither did the public. The buyer was not identified until shortly after he sold the stamp thirty years later. He kept quiet for a reason, and the reason was a grumpy remark attributed to Hind. Soon after the purchase, the New York Times reported that the new owner was “withholding his identity because dealers had deluged Mr. Hind, after he had purchased it, with offers to sell other rarities, often at exorbitant prices.” The new owner recalled a comment by Hind that the pressure had interfered with his business operations.

His silence did not stop ever-higher numbers from being bandied about. In 1949 the New York Times said that the owner had turned down an offer of $60,000 and would not even part with it for $100,000.

That sounded like the kind of damn-the-torpedoes attitude that Hind had taken in tougher times, and like Hind, the new owner of the one-cent magenta, Frederick Trouton Small, was another immigrant who was in the textile business. Small presided over a huge fiber and weaving plant in Maryland for years. But there was a difference. Hind had owned his mill and his company. Small was an employee, however prized he was and however much stock he held—the plant manager for twenty-five years, later a vice president at corporate headquarters in New York.

The company was the Celanese Corporation, which made synthetic yarn and wove fabric from it. Small, an Australian who had been the company’s head of production in Britain when Celanese was turning out a million pounds of acetate yarn a week in the years just after World War I, was instrumental in putting the Maryland plant into operation. The installation of the machinery— indeed, the construction of the factory buildings—ran behind schedule because of a flood. Small arrived with a mandate to get the plant going, apparently even if the rank and file had to work weekends and holidays. The first spool of acetate yarn was finally produced on Christmas Day in 1924. It was marketed as artificial silk.

Small did not take the one-cent magenta home once it was his. He told some reporters that he kept it in his office, first at the plant in Maryland and later in New York. Perhaps when Small’s secretary said he was not available, he was not holed up studying sales figures or reading memos, he was working on his stamp collection. Then again, perhaps not. He told other reporters that he saw the one-cent magenta only once in the thirty years he owned it. That was at the beginning, after he bought it and Kenny sent it to him by registered mail. Small looked at it and sent it back to Kenny for safekeeping, again by registered mail. The New York Times went so far as to write later on that Small “was not a stamp collector. He was an investor in stamps.”

Still, Small had the background of a philatelist. He had collected stamps as a boy in Australia. “It was a lad’s collection,” the Times reported, and his parents gave it away while he was serving in the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps in World War I, first in the defense of the Suez Canal and later in the failed Gallipoli campaign for control of the routes from Russia. He was a mechanical engineer who directed the placement of underground explosives that were used against the Turks. One device exploded sooner than it was supposed to, and Small suffered a knee injury. Later he was trapped in an underground mine that was gassed before he could get out. Later still he was sent to England, where he worked in the Department of Aircraft Production in the Ministry of Munitions. Through a connection there, he met the Swiss brothers who started Celanese. They hired him and sent him to the United States as the company expanded.

He gravitated back to stamps “after seeing the destruction of many classic things” as a soldier in World War I. “Stamps, like everything else, tend to get destroyed,” he said, “and the worth of those that remain go [sic] up.” He owned a fabulous collection of stamps from British Guiana. He also laid claim to specialized collections of stamps from Bavaria and a number of other German states, as well as four collections of Russian stamps that filled forty-five albums—all bought through Kenny at Macy’s.

Small’s identity as the owner of the one-cent magenta may have been the worst-kept secret in philately for thirty years, but his name was not revealed publicly until after he sold the stamp in 1970. The public face of the one-cent magenta for all that time was Kenny. It was Kenny who put his initials on the back of the stamp, a small “FK.”

He left Macy’s to join the Army in 1942 and joined a smaller, stamps-only firm that established itself as a powerhouse in philately after the war, and it was Kenny who was quoted when the one-cent magenta went to stamp shows. Presumably, it was Kenny who made the arrangements, letting the stamp be seen, but not too often. And it was Kenny who recounted the all’s-well-that-ends-well anecdotes that had just enough drama to keep the stamp in the news.

Kenny—and the stamp—traveled only a few blocks to a stamp exhibition at the brand-new New York Coliseum in 1956. Kenny carried the stamp in a back pocket. He stashed a copy of the stamp in another pocket “to foil thieves.” Whether they were real or imagined, it was an irresistible detail in newspaper stories, for there were crowds outside the Coliseum and crowd-pleasers inside. The stamp show, officially the Fifth International Philatelic Exhibition, known as FIPEX, was one of three inaugural events at the Coliseum; the others were the far larger International Automobile Show and the National Photographic Show. The United States Post Office took note of FIPEX by, among other things, issuing a three-cent commemorative stamp showing the chunky, cream-colored Coliseum complex and the statue that stood yards away in Columbus Circle.

For Kenny, there was none of the nail-biting at FIPEX that there had been at CIPEX, the Centenary International Stamp Exhibition, nine years earlier. For that show, also held in New York, the one-cent magenta was, as usual, accompanied by police and plainclothes detectives. The stamp simply vanished, Houdini-like. Its display case had not been broken open. “Despair and suspense mounted as worried officials at CIPEX scurried about, comparing the apparent loss of the British Guiana to the theft of the Mona Lisa,” the philatelic historian Stanley N. Bierman wrote. Eventually, someone noticed that the stamp had slipped from its place and drifted to the floor of the display case. The CIPEX officials called off the search and remounted the stamp, this time on a stamp hinge that would not give way.

Kenny sent the stamp to Australia in 1963 and London in 1965 for exhibitions that went well. The 1970s were not kind to Kenny. The decade began with Small selling the one-cent magenta through a firm other than Kenny’s. In the mid-1970s, the firm Kenny worked for was sold, and Kenny went out on his own. The decade ended with Kenny becoming an unfortunate footnote to history, the first person to plead guilty under a new federal law that made it a crime for Americans to bribe foreign officials.

Congress had passed the law and President Jimmy Carter had signed it in 1977 after an investigation by a high-level task force had found evidence of bribery and other problems by “a significant number of America’s major corporations.” The task force described “facilitation or ‘grease’ payments,” apparently in response to extortion demands by foreign officials, as well as off-the-books slush funds and falsified business records. Senator William Proxmire, the maverick Wisconsin Democrat who had long crusaded against waste and corruption in government, and Senator Frank Church, who had moved to curb “criminal activity” by intelligence agencies after the Watergate scandal, pushed the bill through. But the first case brought by the Justice Department did not name a major defense contractor or a multinational retailer, it named a stamp dealer—Finbar B. Kenny.

Kenny’s business had come to involve more than brokering deals for rare stamps. He was also designing and printing stamps for emerging nations. In 1965, the year in which the Cook Islands in the South Pacific won independence from New Zealand and became an eight-island nation unto itself, Prime Minister Albert Royle Henry struck an economic development deal with Kenny. It promised a faster, surer payoff than, say, building factories for low-cost manufacturing. Kenny would supply limited-edition stamps for the Cook Islands, and he and Sir Albert’s government would divide the profits. The Cook Islands were just following the lead of other tiny countries like Liechtenstein and San Marino, which depended on stamp sales for revenue, mainly from collectors. Kenny was counting on them to buy first-day covers from the Cook Islands.

By 1978, the Cook Islands were posting roughly $1.5 million a year in stamp revenues, about 20 percent of the government’s budget. But Sir Albert—“somewhat of a Huey Long of the South Seas,” according to one account— was in political trouble. A representative of Sir Albert asked Kenny for help. The prime minister wanted an advance of $337,000 against the following year’s stamp revenues, the amount in the budget for old-age pensions. In return, Sir Albert’s government would continue Kenny’s worldwide distribution rights for Cook Islands stamps.

Kenny agreed to the plan. Sir Albert transferred the money from a shell company that Kenny set up, and then used the money to charter six airplanes to fly in 450 Cook Islanders who would vote for him in that year’s election. Sir Albert saw the free trips as the only way to win. He needed the votes. But the Cook Islands had no provision for absentee ballots, and not even he could push one through in time. Under the law, Cook Islanders who lived elsewhere could not cast ballots unless they were on the Cook Islands on Election Day.

Sir Albert won by the slimmest of margins, but the Justice Department said the money from Kenny had been used to rig the election. Prosecutors said Kenny and Sir Albert had schemed to make the arrangement secret, meeting in Honolulu and agreeing on a code to be used in telex messages. Prosecutors also said Kenny’s shell corporations were intended to disguise the payments. Kenny paid a $50,000 fine—and paid the government that toppled Sir Albert’s another $337,000 to cover the old-age pensions.

In 1940, perhaps prompted by the stories about the stamp’s trip to the World’s Fair and its sale to Small, RKO assigned a script that became The Saint in Palm Springs, the sixth in a series of eight “Saint” potboilers. From first pitch to final cut, each probably cost $40,000 to make—by coincidence the amount Mrs. Hind got for the stamp—and could be shot in five days. For a B movie with a crime-solving hero, there had to be a crime. The novelist Leslie Charteris and the screenwriter Jerry Cady concocted one about the theft of the world’s rarest stamp at a resort in Palm Springs, California (where, as it happened, Charteris lived). The Saint in Palm Springs made a profit of $90,000, not as much as RKO’s Tarzan movies or Bringing Up Baby. But Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York Times dripped with sarcasm. Simon Templar, the “Saint” of the title, “is entitled by detective-union rules to a vacation every now and then. And that, from the patron’s point of view, is what his scriptwriter has given him in ‘The Saint at [sic] Palm Springs.’” Crowther wrote that “it isn’t in the least entertaining to watch the sluggish plot unfold. If the familiar name of director Jack Hively weren’t prominent in the list of credits, we’d suspect he’d taken a vacation, too. Obviously the scriptwriters did.”

Precious stamps like the one-cent magenta figured in other movies while Small owned it, notably Charade in 1963. The Audrey Hepburn character ran around with an envelope to which several world-class rarities had been affixed. The plot revolved around hiding them in plain sight, right in front of a cast that included Cary Grant and Walter Matthau.

But the largest single audience heard about the one-cent magenta on a quiz show. On January 18, 1951, five days before he collected an Emmy Award, Groucho Marx lit a cigar and settled into his seat on the quiz show You Bet Your Life. The program was a vehicle for Marx’s zaniness—the audience tuned in for Marx’s one-1iners, which appeared to be ad-libbed (although the director let slip that Marx depended on writers scribbling on an overhead projector, out of camera range, that only he could see). The show had been running on radio since the 1940s, and in 1951 it was still running on radio. But it had added a television broadcast the year before, with cameras whirring away.

In the episode filmed that January evening, George Fenneman, the announcer-sidekick, introduced two contestants: a letter carrier and a stamp collector. Marx joked with the letter carrier about playing post office. Then he turned to the other contestant, Alice Backes, and said, “You’re a stamp collector, is that right, Alice?”

She said she was. “Although I’m more of a philatelist.”

“You’re more a what?”

“A philatelist.”

“Well, I am, too,” Marx deadpanned. “What is a philatelist?”

“Well, it’s, it stems from a Greek word meaning, um, lover of taxes,” she said.

“Lover of taxes?” Marx said. “There isn’t a philatelist in the house.” The studio audience laughed.

Then Marx asked what was the rarest stamp she knew about, and she started talking, knowledgeably, about the one-cent magenta—that it was issued in 1856 and that it was worth $50,000.

Marx, then approaching sixty, made a joke about himself and his longevity: “If I’d only known. I bought a dollar’s worth of those when they first came out, and like a fool, I wasted them all writing mash notes to Dolley Madison.”

Alice Backes wasn’t just a starlet the producers had brought in to flirt with Groucho, as they often did. “She did collect stamps,” recalled her younger sister, Virginia Baxter, who said she had helped with Alice’s album when they were girls. “I would get mail and ask if she wanted the stamp,” Virginia Baxter told me. “Sometimes she would and sometimes she wouldn’t.”

Alice Backes went on to a long career as an actress, appearing on programs like Dragnet, Bachelor Father, Gunsmoke, The Andy Griffith Show, Mayberry R.F.D., and Columbo. She died in 2007 at age eighty-three. Her sister told me Ms. Backes kept her stamp album for years, but it was apparently destroyed in a house fire.

NINE

$286,000

1970: The Wilkes-Barre Eight

T he distance to Manhattan from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—a fading little city in coal country—is 134 miles. For the ten years that the stamp was owned by eight people from Wilkes-Barre, it stayed in a safe-deposit box in a Fifth Avenue bank. The one-cent magenta went to Philadelphia for the nation’s bicentennial. It went to Canada. It went to India and Australia. But it never went to its owners’ hometown.

I did, on a Sunday morning, because I had decided that Wilkes-Barre was another important stop in my journey through Stamp World.

From reading up on Wilkes-Barre, I had a sense that it was a shot-and-a-beer town, and like so many blue-collar strongholds across the nation’s industrial crescent, it was in decline almost before people realized it. From 1950 to 1960, the postwar boom decade when white-collar jobs surpassed blue-collar jobs, Wilkes-Barre’s population fell 17 percent; by 1970, it was two-thirds its size in 1940. After so many years of industrial losses, Wilkes-Barre was a past-tense kind of place, a place to have left after growing up. The actor Jerry Orbach did. Even Joe Palooka, the naive comic-strip prizefighter, did.

But clearly a few of those who remained in Wilkes-Barre, or who moved back after a year or two in Manhattan during their twenties, did well there—very well. The stamp’s new owners were wealthy enough to put up $50,000 apiece (as much as $834,000 apiece in 2016 dollars). Seven of them were not stamp people. The eighth was, and the whole adventure was his idea—the partnership to buy the stamp, the trips to display it at philatelic conventions around the world, the stunts to promote it. His name was Irwin Weinberg. For more than half his life, his business address had been a suite in a bank building: two cluttered rooms and an old-fashioned vault with a military-green door that swung open when he dialed in the combination.

Which is what he did when my wife and I finally got there, and it took him a couple of tries. Inside the vault were stacks and stacks of stamps on shelves that reached to the ceiling. Weinberg said, proudly, that the shelves were rigged with an alarm that would go off if anyone touched anything. The words “booby-trapped” popped into my mind, and I wondered whether “anyone” included Weinberg himself. He showed us any number of stamps in the vault, but he pulled them from boxes on the floor, not the trip-wired shelves. (I’d bet that Ferrary, another shelf-storer, would have rushed back to Paris to install the same kind of security setup if he had tiptoed through Weinberg’s vault.)

We had gone to Weinberg’s office after a couple of hours at his house, which turned out to be a large, comfortable Leave It to Beaver kind of place a mile or so from downtown Wilkes-Barre. The front door had swung open as my wife and I started up the walk, and a tallish blonde woman had stepped out. She was wearing a fur coat over what looked like pajamas.

We were deep in Stamp World now.

She introduced herself as Weinberg’s daughter. She managed an expression that I remember combined a smile and a scowl. She said they were dealing with a domestic disaster. The boiler had blown up the day before and could not be repaired until the following day.

Weinberg was wearing a heavy topcoat over layers of jackets and shirts. They led us into his dark, wood-paneled library, in which someone had set up a couple of space heaters that thrummed and glowed but did not heat the space. He did not care. He wanted to show us a photograph from a White House ceremony in 2002 at which Coretta Scott King had presented President George W. Bush with a portrait of her husband, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Weinberg still sounded thrilled to have been invited and to have met Mrs. King and the Rev. Al Sharpton, another guest.

Weinberg asked what my wife did for a living, and when she said she is a doctor, he launched into his medical history. I began to worry that we would never get around to stamps, but one of his ailments seemed as unique as the one-cent magenta: a malignant tumor inside his ear. It was treated with radiation that weakened the muscles on one side of his face, as if he had had a stroke. I could see from photographs around the room that he had once been handsome and charismatic, and he was still happy to be alive, even if the treatment that saved his life had left him damaged. He was the opposite of Ferrary and Small, who had owned the one-cent magenta before him, and du Pont, who owned it after him. He was more like Hind, an extrovert. He enjoyed people.

But we were shivering. He showed us souvenirs he had brought home while squiring the one-cent magenta to exhibitions around the world. Then we decamped to his office, trailing him as he drove his yellow BMW convertible to a tall, fortress-like building in downtown Wilkes-Barre that had once been the headquarters of a bank. He explained that the bank was gone and the building was being converted into apartments. He told us he had worked out a deal to stay—the only tenant from the old days, when office space upstairs, on the floors above the bank, was filled with lawyers and doctors.

Weinberg settled in behind his big desk and told us that he had done well in the stamp business when he was young. He had also owned a rug-cleaning operation that he bought in the 1950s with a loan from the same bank. He said that a friend at the bank had heard it was for sale and told him that the bank would finance the deal for him. When Weinberg said he knew nothing about running a professional cleaning business, the friend said, “The man who owns it now comes in every Friday with a big deposit. That’s all you need to know.”

But by the late 1960s, he was edgy. An ugly war in Southeast Asia was dragging on, and the economy was sluggish. Wall Street sensed it. Weinberg, an assiduous reader of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, sensed it. Weinberg knew from his reading that industrial production was continuing to rise as defense contractors kept pace with the escalation in Vietnam. He was also concerned that unemployment rates were close to historic highs. Weinberg knew that those two elements together would put pressure on the third variable in the economic equation, consumer prices, and that the result would be inflation.

He was right: the cost of the most basic items shot up. The Consumer Price Index climbed more than 4 percent in 1968 and more than 5 percent in 1969, and would jump nearly 6 percent in 1970. Weinberg suspected that the country was sliding into its worst money crisis since the Depression. Conventional economic thinking held that runaway inflation and high unemployment were mutually exclusive—they could not happen at the same time. But the frustrated chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, could say only, “The rules are not working the way they used to.”

Weinberg thought he knew how to beat the dismal economic forecasts: buy famous stamps.

And then he heard that the rarest and most expensive stamp of all was going on the block.

Weinberg got hooked on stamps in the late 1930s, when the policymakers in Washington, concluding that the Great Depression was over, cut spending and raised taxes— and the economy slipped into a recession that came close to destroying the still-new New Deal. Weinberg was nine or ten years old, and a boy in his Wilkes-Barre neighborhood made what sounded like a puzzling offer: he would give Weinberg some stamps—and some hinges. Weinberg said to himself, “Hinges. How am I going to fasten a stamp to the page with a door hinge?”

Weinberg soon learned what stamp collectors’ hinges were. And Weinberg saw the potential for making money from stamps. “I thought to myself, you know, there are stamp dealers out there, and I wrote to one of them and he sent me stamps to buy. And I spent a good twenty-five cents or something, and as time went on, I thought to myself, I’d like to be a stamp dealer like that.”

Weinberg got a glimpse of the one-cent magenta at the World’s Fair in New York in 1940. There was so much to see: the icons of the fair, the Trylon and Perisphere; Futurama, with its promise of automated highways; the giant cash register atop one building; even little Lorin Maazel, the future music director of orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic, making his New York conducting debut at nine years old.

Weinberg was twelve and staying with cousins who lived in Newark, New Jersey. At the fair, $1 million worth of stamps were on view at the British Pavilion, celebrating Rowland Hill’s legacy, the hundredth anniversary of Britain’s first postage stamp. Weinberg and his cousins followed the crowd to where the one-cent magenta was on display, courtesy of Mrs. Hind. Weinberg did not see her and was not overwhelmed by the tiny scrap of dark reddish paper. “I never thought about it again”—until, he told me decades later, he owned the stamp.

Weinberg had after-school jobs as a grocery-store stock boy and as a Fuller Brush salesman—“I’d knock on the door, put my head down and say, ‘I’m your Fuller Brush man. May I come in?’ and then just go right through, dump all the stuff on the floor.” He was persuasive, and from his house-to-house rounds, he made money he could spend. For $5.18, he bought himself a bus ticket from Wilkes-Barre to New York.

The bus dropped him off near Times Square, but he was not interested in the lights of Broadway or the heights of the Empire State Building. The destination he had in mind was Nassau Street downtown, not far from the New York Stock Exchange, where the stamp dealers were. Many were there because they had been stockbrokers before the crash of 1929; a few were refugees who had arrived in the United States with the only thing they could carry, a pocketful of stamps.

Weinberg spent $18 on a box full of stamps, which he then sold, making about $25 by the time the last one was gone. He took the $25 and went back to New York and bought more stamps, again selling them for more money. Eventually, one of the dealers promised him a thirty-five-dollar-a-week job when he graduated from high school. Weinberg accepted the offer, rented a room for $5 a week and, by advertising and selling his own stamps on the side, did better than he had expected. Then, on a trip back to Wilkes-Barre, he toyed with the idea of opening his own stamp business there. The overhead would be lower than if he set up shop in New York. He could work from his bedroom in his parents’ house. So that’s what he did.

But Weinberg kept in touch with the big-city stamp dealers in New York. One of them asked what Weinberg did with the names of the people who answered the ads Weinberg placed in stamp magazines. “Nothing,” Weinberg said. The dealer said that was a mistake. He told Weinberg he should build a mailing list from the ad responses and send out a list of “other merchandise”— meaning other stamps he had in his inventory. “I said, ‘Oh. I don’t have any other merchandise,’” Weinberg recalled, but the other dealer offered to lend him stamps to sell. He and Weinberg split the profits for a year or two as Weinberg sent out the first of his lists, which he typed up like a newsletter. Miner’s Stamp News, he called it.

Seventy years later, Weinberg was still typing lists and sending them out every Monday. The only difference was the way he printed them. In the 1940s he had spent $5 on a used mimeograph, a smallish machine that did not take up much space in his bedroom. By 2015 he had a massive copying machine that filled the lower half of a wall in his office. He complained that the array of buttons and touch-screen controls was confusing, and that the mimeograph machine worked better. And, on the Sunday afternoon we visited Weinberg—deadline time for Miner’s Stamp News—the paper jammed deep inside the new and complicated machine. He looked befuddled, so I started opening the many doors and drawers on the copier. It took a few minutes, but eventually I cleared the jam for him.

Buying the one-cent magenta was, Weinberg told us, “sort of an afterthought.” His plan, in the late 1960s, had been to buy rare stamps as a hedge against the inflation he was certain was coming—stamps that were better looking than the one-cent magenta and that would be appealing when the time came to sell them and cash out. “He [was] bullish on ‘conservation of capital,’” the stamp writer Viola Ilma reported after meeting Weinberg. “He says, ‘True investment must have withstood the test of time, have protected its capital consistently in terms of purchasing power and … be instantly liquid.’” He said that other luxury investments—gold, diamonds, even real estate—were dangerous, but “the great classic stamps are first of all known unchangeable quantities.” Nothing else held the promise of stamps.

By 1968, he was mulling over the timing. He was so sure the economy would overheat and inflation would become a bigger headache than it had been in 1966 and 1967 that, chatting with his mother-in-1aw one day, he said, “It’s almost a sure thing unless the war ends.” She said, “If that’s all that’s holding you back, get going with it, because Nixon will never end this war.”

Weinberg recruited eight investors and set up a limited partnership. None of them knew much about stamps. One was a lawyer, another owned some hotels, another was a furniture manufacturer—“but,” Weinberg said, “they all could see what I thought I saw.” Weinberg, as the partner in charge, would make the decisions on what to buy. He was so confident in the investment power of the Inverted Jenny that he bought two in one week in 1969—one for $29,000, the other for $33,000—and in 1970, he bought another, for $34,000. He would go on to spend $10,000 for some extremely rare Alexandria Provisionals from the 1840s. Like the one-cent magenta, these were apparently printed at a local newspaper, the Alexandria Gazette in Northern Virginia. They were issued before the United States introduced postage stamps that could be accepted anywhere in the nation. Not many Alexandria Provisionals exist. The one that Weinberg bought took longer to be discovered than the one-cent magenta. It was not found until 1894.

Weinberg proselytized about stamps as an investment. He would tell people that stamps were “the only investment that has not had a major recession.” “Inflation and devaluation are twin specters that Weinberg often plays on,” Joseph L. Lincoln later wrote in the Sunday Bulletin in Philadelphia. “It’s not a question of how high stamps will go, but how low your currency will go.”

Most financial advisers would caution that stamp collectors should never expect anything other than enjoyment from what is, after all, a hobby. But Weinberg was betting on something more than fun: solid returns from relatively modest investments in stamps. Until the day a reporter from the local newspaper dialed Weinberg’s number.

The reporter had seen a wire-service story that said the one-cent magenta was coming up for sale for the first time in thirty years. The reporter wanted to know if Weinberg planned to bid on it.

Weinberg faked his way through the conversation. He did not tell the reporter he had not heard about the sale, saying, “We will probably be interested.”

There was no probably about it. Once he hung up the phone, Weinberg went into high gear, even though, as he put it, “This was way out of proportion for us.” He had not contemplated spending as much on any one stamp as he would have to bid for the magenta. Nor had his original strategy included bidding against better-known collectors who probably had deeper pockets. Still, he called his investors together. They urged Weinberg on, insisting he almost had to buy the one-cent magenta if they were to reign as leading investors in rare stamps.

Weinberg was surprised. “I really didn’t think they’d all react this way,” he said, “and of course there was the unknown as to what the price would be.” After so many years in the stamp business, he assumed it would be high. “I told them it was going to be a number significantly larger than any we had used to buy anything,” he said. Weinberg guessed the bidding could climb toward the half-million-dollar mark. “It’s the only one like it,” he said. “I knew the world was going to be interested. The queen [of England] was rumored to be interested. And there are other people out there.”

Each partner put up an extra $50,000. Not quite $200,000 remained in the partners’ account—money Weinberg had not yet spent on less expensive purchases. They agreed that Weinberg could go to $500,000. If the bidding for the one-cent magenta went higher, he would have to drop out.

Now Weinberg was in the big leagues. The lavishly printed catalogue for the sale confirmed it: seventy-six pages bound inside a blue velvet cover designed for this annual “rarities of the world” sale. The one-cent magenta was shown in color on the title page and in black and white on page seventy-one, where it was listed, a bit breathlessly, as Lot No. 279 in the sale: “Unique, the rarest and most valuable stamp in the world.” The other pages of the catalog were packed with lesser treasures. A one-cent Benjamin Franklin from 1861 with a minimum bid of $9,000 was described as “fresh, fine, [a] handsome example of this great rarity.” An 1869 block of six ninety-cent stamps with Abraham Lincoln’s portrait was “very fine, a fabulous showpiece.” The next line said that only one other block of six was known to exist—and that the minimum bid was $13,500.

Some mistakes were expected to bring big money. Four lots featured one-cent stamps known as Pan-American Inverts from 1901. The stamps celebrated “Fast Lake Navigation,” according to the legend above the words “Postage One Cent,” but the impressive-looking ship in the center, like the Inverted Jennies later on, was upside down. Lot No. 136 was a two-cent Pan-American Invert that saluted “fast express.” Its train, with a smoke-belching locomotive trailed by old-fashioned coaches, was also upside down. A few sheets of the inverted stamps had somehow escaped whatever checking was done at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Philatelists assume that someone at the Bureau stopped the presses and turned the sheets around before they went through the second time. About two hundred misprints apparently slipped out and were spotted—and quickly sold—in at least four post offices.

The owner of the one-cent magenta, Frederick Trouton Small, had chosen Robert A. Siegel, a leading New York stamp dealer, to handle the sale. At the firm’s office in Midtown Manhattan, there was discussion about how to showcase the one-cent magenta as the star of the sale. Siegel’s wife, Miriam, hatched the idea of the velvet cover. She had two prototypes made, a green one and a blue one. She decided on the blue velvet cover. The firm also ordered brandy snifters with the firm’s logo on one side and a reproduction of the one-cent magenta on the other.

Despite the assurance on page seventy-one that the one-cent magenta was unique, in one respect it was not. It was one of three lots in the sale that were so rare that they did not carry estimated prices. The Apollo 11 first-day cover that comprised Lot No. 203 was practically brand-new. It had been issued six months earlier to celebrate the Apollo 11 moon landing and had been engraved with a die that had been aboard the lunar landing craft. Nearly nine million first-day covers were processed, more than for any other stamp in United States postal history. But this one was different. The colors were not aligned correctly. The dark blue of the earth was on the surface of the moon, and the red stripes of the American-flag shoulder patch on Neil A. Armstrong’s space suit almost at his elbow.

But it went unmentioned in the three-page introduction in the front of the catalogue, which was all about the one-cent magenta. The introduction recounted the “emergency shortage of regular stamps” in British Guiana that prompted the postmaster to order provisional stamps—and the improbable journey of this stamp from Vaughan to the unidentified “present owner.” Small’s identity was revealed only after the catalogue had gone to the printer.

“The eyes of the philatelic world are focused on the Louis XVI Room of the Waldorf-Astoria,” the catalogue announced, hinting at how the Waldorf was synonymous with New York itself. The Waldorf was where presidents and princes and playboys stayed. Herbert Hoover and General Douglas MacArthur had lived there. As stamp collectors knew, James A. Farley, the Postmaster General under Franklin D. Roosevelt, had lived at the Waldorf since the 1940s. What the catalogue did not hint at was how many people would want to be on hand. The auction had to be moved to the far larger Grand Ballroom to accommodate the crowd, which the New York Times carefully reported was “likely the largest ever for a stamp auction.”

The “rarities of the world” sale was a rite of spring for stamp collectors. Siegel’s stepson, Andrew Levitt, then thirty years old, presided, gavel in hand. In the crowd were notables like Robert Price, a former deputy mayor under John V. Lindsay, who repeated the rumor that “a band of Englishmen” had designs on the stamp and would bid for the queen, a prospect that had frightened some collectors into keeping their paddles in their laps when the one-cent magenta finally went on sale.

Another was Martin Apfelbaum, a dealer from Philadelphia who had grown the stamp business he took over from his father into the nation’s largest retail stamp operation. Apfelbaum’s father had sold his own collection in the Depression to make ends meet, and Apfelbaum, just out of college, would load his car with books of stamps and consign them to hobby shops and drug stores. By the 1960s, he was in the hunt for rarities, and he had money to spend. He bought a tractor-trailer-load of stamps for $150,000 in 1957. It took seven years to sell the twenty-five million stamps inside.

Though Weinberg presented himself as a small-town guy, he was not as unfamiliar with glamor and glitz as he claimed. For years he was a regular in Atlantic City, and with stamps as his calling card, he had connections. He became friendly with Frank Sinatra’s business manager, a fellow philatelist, and with a Manhattan hairstylist who introduced him to the salon’s A-list clients, among them Patti Page, Greer Garson, and Lena Horne.

Weinberg booked a suite at the Waldorf and holed up in it during the afternoon, away from the crowd that was building in the ballroom. He was jittery. He could not afford to tip his hand. He did not want to risk someone overhearing him make a casual remark and figuring out how much to bid against him. Weinberg feared that even his facial expressions would give him away, that competing bidders would realize he had other people’s money—lots of it, by Stamp World standards—and the authority to spend it, up to a point. Weinberg knew the major players, and they knew him. Siegel, the patriarch of the prestigious firm running the sale, was on hand; his stepson was its public face.

Andrew Levitt had started in the Siegel firm’s mail-room as a teenager. His stepfather had promoted him to auctioneer and then to vice president, and it was Levitt who would bring down the gavel on Lot No. 279. In his career he would sell scores of rarities, not all of them stamps—checks signed by Charles Dickens and Calvin Coolidge, and land grants signed by James Monroe. But he would brag about selling the one-cent magenta for the rest of his life, during which, by his tally, he sold more than three hundred million dollars’ worth of stamps.

Weinberg looked nervous when he walked into the Grand Ballroom. He tried to stay out of sight behind the curtains at the back of the room. Finally, when Levitt announced the one-cent magenta, with a minimum bid of $100,000— the crowd quieted down. Looking out from his lectern, Levitt saw several hands go up. They stayed up as Levitt pushed the bidding along, first in jumps of $20,000, then in spurts of only $10,000. At $200,000, Robson Lowe, perhaps the leading British dealer at the time, lowered his hand. Joseph L. Lincoln, a senior at Princeton who had been the stamp columnist for the Sunday Bulletin in Philadelphia since junior high school, recalled a “staring contest” between Weinberg and the Weills—Raymond and Roger, well-established New Orleans dealers with whom Weinberg did not want to duel. The New Yorker magazine noted the Weills had looked “calmer and calmer” and Weinberg “more and more nervous.”

“We figured this meant that the Weills weren’t going to go for it and Weinberg was,” The New Yorker concluded. The New York Times wrote that the Weills dropped out at $250,000. Weinberg kept his hand up. So did a Boston dealer, but not for long. After only one more round back and forth, which drove the price $30,000 higher, all the other hands had come down and Weinberg was the only bidder still standing—literally. He had been on his feet the whole time, pacing in the back of the ballroom. Levitt said what auctioneers always say before they pound the gavel—“fair warning.” Following the custom of not identifying buyers by name, he said the one-cent magenta was “going to I.W.” He did not have to say who Weinberg was. Well-wishers surrounded him.

It was over in about ninety seconds. Weinberg told me that he felt “euphoric”—and more than 40 years later, he was still so excited that he spelled out the word forward and backward. “A lot of people, including Mr. Weinberg, thought that Mr. Weinberg had acquired a bargain,” The New Yorker observed tartly. Weinberg was happy that the price was so far below the partners’ $500,000 limit. Apfelbaum said the chatter about possible British bidders had shaved at least $100,000 off the price.

There was some grumbling, louder than when Small bought the stamp, that Weinberg and his noncollector partners were transforming what should be a pastime for amateurs into a business. “A lot of people questioned spending that much,” Ken Martin, the executive director of the American Philatelic Society, told me. “Some questioned whether he was turning it into a commodity.” David Lidman of the New York Times, who covered the sale, quoted one of the Weill brothers as saying they preferred a customer “who has a warmth for stamps. It’s a waste to sell a rare stamp to someone who sticks it in a safe and forgets it.”

Weinberg stuck it in the safe, all right, but he did not forget it, and he did not let the world forget it. He marketed the stamp more exuberantly than Hind had. “What do I know, huh?” Weinberg told me. “I believe in ‘Camelot.’ I believe in stuff like that, I really do. I believe in The Great Gatsby.” He identified with Nick Carraway—“but I was going to become a Gatsby. That was my thinking.”

He was going to do it with hoopla and hype. The stamp was coddled and cooed over, and he was comped. Baby-boomer philatelists who had grown up figuring they would never see it marveled at—well, not its beauty. But taking it to stamp exhibitions was an element of Weinberg’s strategy. He wanted to build interest that would pump up the price when he decided it was time to part with it—or, as he put it, “I was trying to introduce it to the world, and maybe find a buyer.”

It turned out that Weinberg had a knack for stunts that generated publicity far beyond stamp magazines. In return for press releases and photo ops, airlines offered him free seats. Weinberg stole an idea from Mrs. Hind and once asked an armored car to take the stamp from the bank on Fifth Avenue to the airport—again, in return for the publicity. His plan was to slip the one-cent magenta into his briefcase, climb into the armored car, ride to the airport and fly off with the briefcase clutched in his lap. He even drummed up television coverage simply by telephoning a station in New York. A camera crew met him at the bank.

“It was uneventful,” Weinberg told me, “excepting that the armored car got lost on the way to the airport.” Weinberg rushed onto the plane with the stamp safe in his briefcase. Everything else he had packed for the trip— the luggage he checked at the gate—was lost.

The word spread. A Japanese delegation arrived in Wilkes-Barre to invite Weinberg to Tokyo. He was reluctant or coy—or both. “I said I really didn’t think I want to do it,” he remembered in 2015. “They said, ‘You don’t realize what this could be.’ I said, tell me. They said it would be shown in Tokyo the same way the Mona Lisa was, plus all expenses, plus ten-thousand dollars for my partners.” Off he went. He rode the bullet train and was the guest of honor at “parties galore.”

“Most of the time, I was in nirvana,” Weinberg said— even when things went wrong.

In 1978, Weinberg booked a trip to Toronto and another stamp show with an acronym—CAPEX, for Canadian Philatelic Exhibition. It celebrated the Universal Postal Union, the main forum for international cooperation among nations with postal networks, which Canada had joined one hundred years earlier.

Weinberg needed a new gimmick. The armored-car ride would no longer generate attention or press coverage, but he hit upon an idea that would: he would chain himself to his briefcase. He sent his teenage son to an army-navy store for a pair of handcuffs.

Weinberg was not afraid that the briefcase would be snatched and the stamp stolen. He did not even snap the handcuffs onto his wrist until the plane was about to land in Toronto. The handcuffs were a prop that would get the attention of the photographers he knew would surround him as he emerged from the jet bridge. Officials from the stamp show would promptly whisk him off to a news conference.

The reporters asked the usual questions—how much was the stamp worth, where had it been, what were his plans for selling it. As the news conference dragged on, Weinberg figured the photographers had their photographs, and the handcuff felt tight on his wrist. No one noticed as he slipped the key from his pocket and pushed it into the handcuff, and he kept his game face on as he turned the key and felt it break in his hand. “I thought it best not to say anything. I thought, just keep talking and worry about it later,” he said. “So, as things went along, one of the reporters said, ‘When are you going to take the handcuff off?’ I said, ‘A little later on, when I get to the room.’”

The reporters left. Weinberg broke the news to one of the organizers: He would remain shackled to his briefcase unless they found someone to free him. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll get somebody in here to help you,’” Weinberg recalled. Security guards borrowed hairpins and paper clips but could not open the handcuffs with them. A firefighter arrived a bit later and announced, “I have just the thing that will do it.” He left the room, only to return with a saw.

He was just starting to cut into the handcuffs when the door opened and one of the reporters returned. “He said, ‘I saw this guy coming in with a handsaw,’” Weinberg said. “‘Would you mind if I did a story about it and took a picture?’” Weinberg told me that he had not thought about mining the mishap for publicity, but he believed that any publicity was good publicity. Weinberg remembered thinking, “This is exactly what I would want if I could dream up a thing like this.”

The firefighter, though, would not hear of it. He said the fire department had rules, and one was no publicity. The reporter pleaded: “If you let us do this, I promise you it will be world news by tomorrow.”

The fireman relented when the reporter promised to keep him out of the photograph, and went back to sawing off the handcuffs.

The reporter was right, of course. The story was picked up around the world and in People magazine (which wrote that the steel was too thick for the firefighter’s hacksaw, and that Weinberg was freed with the help of a police officer’s key).

Weinberg became a minor celebrity. The one-cent magenta became a part of Weinberg’s identity, just as it had once become a part of Hind’s identity. He appeared on the game show To Tell the Truth and on Mike Douglas’s talk show.

By then, he was saying the stamp was worth between $500,000 and $1 million.

TEN

$935,000

1980: “The Man Showed Up”

W einberg cruised through the 1970s—literally. He crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth 2 with his briefcase in tow and the stamp locked inside. But by 1980, he was ready to cash out. It was time. He had watched his predictions come true, one by one. The economy had soured, inflation had surged, and so had interest rates—the prime was heading toward 20 percent. The stock market was languishing, and suddenly the most appealing investments were collectibles like stamps, which seemed immune to the ups and downs that were causing so many headaches.

A stockbroker quoted by the New York Times said he was fighting to break even on his stocks and bonds but making money on his collectibles. New York magazine echoed that idea with a page of investment advice headlined “Better Than Blue Chips.” It was about the intangible market for tangibles like stamps and more esoteric items, from cigar-box labels to Louis XVI armoires. Salomon Brothers—ruled by one of Wall Street’s monarchs, John H. Gutfreund, who had risen to power as the preeminent bond trader of his generation—began keeping track of what it diplomatically called “nontraditional investments” that were not traded on the stock exchanges. From 1969 to 1979, Chinese ceramics led the list with compounded annual yields of 18 percent, followed by rare books at 16.5 percent, and stamps at 15.4 percent. The conventional economic indicators in those years measured misery. The Consumer Price Index charged ahead at an annual rate of 6.1 percent.

The returns from collectibles seemed limitless, but some economists wondered about a modern-day tulipomania, one of the celebrated boom-and-bust episodes in economic history. The question was, how long could the bull market for collectibles—and, in particular, stamps—continue? When Stamps magazine asked Andrew Levitt, who had brought down the gavel at the auction of the one-cent magenta ten years before, he answered, “Possibly two more years.” That was in 1979.

Weinberg’s investors were not so sure. A couple of them threatened to force a distress sale and buy the stamp out from under him if Weinberg did not get the kind of price he was talking about, which was anything above $500,000. Weinberg dissuaded them and took the stamp to Robert A. Siegel, whose New York auction house had handled the 1970 sale.

Weinberg seemed to lurch from one nail-biting encounter to another. The night before the sale, Siegel, obviously upset, tracked him down: “What am I going to do? We don’t have a bid.” Weinberg told Siegel to sell the stamp no matter what. Siegel replied, “My God, it will be a disaster, wreck my reputation.” Weinberg shrugged: “Nothing I can do about it.”

Weinberg told me that Siegel’s mood had turned sunny by the time they saw each other on the morning of the auction. Siegel told him: “Irwin, everything I said to you last night, forget it. He, the man, showed up.”

Weinberg did not ask who “the man” was, and Siegel did not tell him. And if Weinberg saw a thin man in his early thirties slip into the second or third row as the bidding began, Weinberg did not notice.

Stamps were one of John E. du Pont’s passions. He loved buying them, loved assembling them into first-rate collections: stamps from Canada, stamps from the early days of the American postal system on cover, stamps from obscure places like Samoa, stamps that were the kinds of rarities that unlimited wealth could buy. He had other early stamps from British Guiana: du Pont amassed cottonreels, lots of cottonreels, as if he were assembling the most complete collection of cottonreels in private hands. “The queen had only twenty cottonreels,” du Pont’s onetime business manager, Victor Krievins, told me when I called him in early 2015. “John had thirty-three.”

Du Pont was thrilled to own the one-cent magenta. He beamed when he whispered to insiders that he had bought it even as he used a pseudonym to use at stamp shows—Rae Maeder, an anagram of Demerara, the region in which the one-cent had been printed and issued. But du Pont did not see the stamp or handle it for the last fourteen years of his life, the fourteen years he spent in prison after killing the wrestler Dave Schultz. The one-cent magenta languished in one vault or another, in one bank or another, seen by almost no one—and after du Pont died in a prison hospital, could not be found.

But only for seventy-two hours or so. Someone had put it in the wrong box.

On the surface, the 2014 film Foxcatcher is about one man’s obsession with wrestling, but it is also about extreme wealth—and about who can afford expensive possessions like rare stamps. With its purchase by du Pont, the one-cent magenta had passed back into a world of money and privilege, and into the odd life of someone who used the fortune he inherited to purchase what he lacked: friendship, respect, and self-esteem.

The title of the film referred to the estate on the Main Line outside Philadelphia where du Pont lived with his mother. The mansion itself was a work of art, an exact copy of Montpelier, the Virginia plantation that belonged to James and Dolley Madison. Du Pont’s grandfather had bought the original Montpelier as the twentieth century was dawning. Montpelier’s last private owner was du Pont’s aunt Marion duPont Scott [her preferred spelling]; after her death, du Pont joined his brother Henry in a lawsuit that they won. She had stipulated that Montpelier would go to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. They moved to block the transfer unless they received compensation. Under the settlement that was worked out, they sold Montpelier to the National Trust for $2 million each—$4.57 million each in today’s dollars. The money to pay them came from a separate multimillion-dollar fund for upkeep of the house that she had also bequeathed to the National Trust.

Du Pont’s early life had been a curious blend of overwhelming privilege and emotional isolation. Du Pont himself was born in 1938, the fourth and youngest child of Jean Liseter Austin and William du Pont Jr., the great-grandson of Éleuthère Iréneé du Pont, who had built the Delaware gunpowder mill that was the cornerstone of the world’s largest chemical company. William left when John was two and had little to do with the family. As du Pont acknowledged to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1986, William’s absence left a lasting scar. “I spent a lifetime looking for a father,” he declared. He claimed to have found one in Villanova’s legendary track-and-field coach, Jumbo Elliott. But that was before Villanova repudiated du Pont, shutting down the wrestling program he had underwritten with donations totaling more than $15 million.

Du Pont also considered himself an athlete despite his lack of special talent. He had one great victory when he was in his late twenties, in the 1965 Australian national pentathlon. It was “a triumph that was essentially bought,” the New York Times said.

The closest he came to the 1968 Olympics was in the comic pages of newspapers. He was the model for “Jeff Newtown, Olympic athlete” in the action-adventure comic strip Steve Canyon that year. Du Pont finally went to the Olympics in person in 1976, when he was thirty-eight, but not as a competitor on the pentathlon team. He was the team manager.

His mother—an heiress to another old-money fortune, from a company that had built railroad locomotives—was competitive, and she passed that trait along to her son. She won more than three thousand ribbons, cups, trophies, and awards at horse shows, cattle shows, and dog shows. Du Pont said she encouraged his interest in collecting—Victor Krievins told me he saw invoices in Mrs. du Pont’s name for stamp purchases made by du Pont—but stamps were not his only fascination.

Du Pont also assembled world-renowned collections of seashells and birds; he is credited with discovering some twenty species, including a Philippine parrot and a Mexican sparrow. He built the Delaware Museum of Natural History outside Wilmington to house his trove. He assembled enormous collections of everything from expensive silverware to tin toys to fine Staffordshire china. He also had an impressive cache of weapons, including a Civil War—era Gatling gun that he kept in the library of the family mansion. And then he focused on stamps and wrestling. Of all the rarities he owned, the centerpiece was the little red stamp he called the “magenta lady.”

Some philatelists worried that he would damage it. Warwick Paterson, a New Zealand stamp dealer who knew du Pont, visited him once and “noted with dismay du Pont’s tendency to smoke whilst looking at his prize stamp,” Paterson’s son wrote after his father’s death. Warwick Paterson “feared that [the smoke] would further cause deterioration” to the stamp.

He fancied himself a modern renaissance man but lived mostly out of the limelight. The Sunday papers did not show him in the boldface-name crowds at society parties and charity balls. He spent his money in other ways. He provided the local police department with equipment, including bulletproof vests and body armor developed by his family’s company. For more than thirty years, he let officers train at his private shooting range. He invited some of them to live on the estate. He gave one a second job raising quail and pheasant. Du Pont allowed the officer to sell the eggs—and a certain number of quail and pheasant—so long as he provided some for the house.

In return, du Pont was permitted to play police officer, driving around with a badge and a siren as an honorary, unpaid officer. He even had a uniform. The organizations he financed mostly dismissed him as harmless. Officers regarded problems like excessive drinking as private matters.

Du Pont took a seat in the audience at the 1980 auction, but he was so concerned about preserving his anonymity that he did not place his bid himself. The man sitting next to him did that—Krievins, who would later go to work for du Pont but who was on the auction-house staff at the time. One of Krievins’s jobs was to represent “secretive people who bought things quietly.” And du Pont was secretive. He wanted to grin inscrutably when asked if he was the owner—not saying yes, but not saying no, either—so Krievins acted as a surrogate who was under orders to be equally tight-lipped. “I bid on the stamp, and people said, ‘Who bought the stamp?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know,’” Krievins told me. Krievins kept the secret for years. “I never disclosed it, not even to my ex-father-in-law, who was a stamp collector,” he told me.

Du Pont hired Krievins away from the Siegel auction house in 1984. Krievins told me he functioned as a business manager, reviewing bills and approving payments, among other things: “It was a curse to be a du Pont. People saw that name and thought right away it was a license to steal. People were trying to double- and triple-bill him.” But most of all, Krievins had a hand in du Pont’s stamp purchases, two million dollars’ worth in the ten years he worked for him. When the stamps were sold after du Pont’s death, they went for a total of $17 million. “I always bought the best of the best,” Krievens told me, proudly.

The bidding on the one-cent magenta opened at $325,000. The auctioneer this time was Robert A. Siegel himself. Andrew Levitt, the auctioneer in 1970, had left Siegel’s firm several years earlier. Weinberg, fretting that he and his partners would not see a big payday, relaxed as the bidding heated up. He had planned a gathering in his suite no matter what happened. Very soon he knew there would be nothing funereal about it. In less than a minute—fifty seconds—the sale was over. It sold for $935,000, a 337 percent profit for Weinberg and his partners. As the stamp was gaveled down, he sent his son to call the front desk and double the order of champagne.

With forty-some stiffly formal rooms, du Pont’s mansion was, as the Philadelphia reporters Bill Ordine and Ralph Vigoda wrote in their book about du Pont, “more fief-dom than home.” It had its serfs and vassals, its peasants and knights, buzzing around a temperamental master. Of the people who came to surround du Pont as he bought more and more stamps, two—Robert P. Odenweller and Taras M. Wochok—had toyed with philately as boys. They did not grow up with du Pont’s unlimited cash. They scrimped and saved nickels and dimes from their allowances. They spent their dollars on a stamp they could mount on a page in an album, and then they would stare at the empty spaces on the rest of the page and long to buy another stamp, and another, and another. But there was something about philately—the near-obsessive joy of inquiring about obscure stamps and acquiring them—that would continue to captivate one of them as an adult: Odenweller, the would-be astronaut.

The son of a West Pointer whose love of the Army ran so deep that he was buried on the grounds of the United States Military Academy, Odenweller graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1960. His ambition was to be an astronaut, and he had his sights set on the astronaut-training program. He was too young for the Project Mercury flights—the first seven astronauts had been chosen while he was in school, and he was thirteen years younger than the youngest of them, Gordon Cooper. But the wait was long. Years earlier, he had been treated to a flight with the record-setting test pilot Chuck Yeager. That only served to make him more determined. But there was a problem. He was too tall.

The original seven astronauts were only five feet eight inches tall. The second group was two inches taller, and eventually six-footers joined the space program. Odenweller stands six feet two inches tall. A space suit is not a tank top or a hoodie—one size will not fit all, and he could not have squeezed into the first space suits, which were custom-made for the first astronauts (although the astronauts could swap suits if necessary). Odenweller knew all this, and hoped for another two-inch step, but it never happened. Faced with that reality—and a gallbladder operation—he resigned from the Air Force and became a pilot with Trans World Airlines.

The career choice was deliberate. Flying for TWA would let him visit the far-off places whose stamps had intrigued him since childhood. “When I was seven years old,” he recalled when I met him in 2014, when he was in his seventies, “I was told by a guy who was at least triple my age, ‘If you ever want to be a success in stamp collecting, you have to pick a country you like, learn everything you can about it, get everything you can from it and, in short, become an expert.’” This was the path not taken by Arthur Hind. But Odenweller decided to specialize. “A year or so before that, I had spent the princely sum of two dollars on one New Zealand stamp. And my allowance was twenty-five cents a week, so I figured, with that much capital invested in New Zealand, I was committed for life.”

Not until years later did he realize the difficulty of that commitment. It is considered particularly challenging to collect stamps from New Zealand because of the papers its stamps were printed on, the watermarks that were embedded in the papers, the inks that the printers used and the perforations—minutiae to someone mailing a letter, but matters of paramount importance to someone like Odenweller, who went on to spend his life analyzing and categorizing the differences in extreme detail. And he branched out beyond New Zealand.

Life as an airline captain provided time during layovers for him to explore such things—and to meet and make friends with local experts and top exhibitors. Over the years, he immersed himself in what amounted to a decades-long graduate-level course in stamps from places like British Guiana: British colonies, or former colonies, with philatelic histories that dated to the earliest days of stamps. He edited a three-volume encyclopedia of nineteenth-century mail from Hawaii, whose history has enough of a British flavor that the state flag incorporates the Union Jack. He also assembled a prize-winning collection of stamps from the Australian island-state of Tasmania, which, after a long flight across the Pacific, is little more than a short hop from Sydney.

There were other destinations, with other stamps and other postal histories to explore, and by the time Odenweller encountered du Pont, Odenweller had become a recognized expert. He joined the Royal Philatelic Society London, whose Expert Committee had declared the one-cent magenta to be real when Hind’s widow tried to sell it in the 1930s, and eventually was appointed to its governing council. And the Royal published two books that he wrote—in its usual limited editions. Odenweller had suggested that the Royal print six hundred fifty copies of his massively detailed study of nineteenth-century Samoan postal history and stamps. The chairman of the Royal’s publications committee was willing to allow only three hundred. But he stepped down before the book went to press, and after working through the manuscript, his replacement told Odenweller that the Royal would raise the print order, to five hundred copies. They sold out within a month.

Each copy was numbered. No. 1 was sent to the queen and deposited in the Royal Philatelic Collection at St. James’s Palace. No. 2 went to someone who owned many of the stamps that Odenweller described in the book, a man who was in prison at the time it came out—John E. du Pont.

Odenweller had met du Pont in 1980, not long after du Pont bought the one-cent magenta, when du Pont agreed to be a courier for Odenweller, or, more precisely, to be a courier for Odenweller’s insurance agent. Du Pont had taken his proud new purchase to a stamp collectors’ exhibition in New Zealand—under a pseudonym, of course. At the show, du Pont stopped at Odenweller’s exhibit, which won the top prize, and a dealer who was accompanying du Pont was explaining a page of stamps in Odenweller’s display.

“How much is something like that worth?” du Pont asked.

“Oh, about a quarter of a million dollars,” the dealer answered.

Odenweller, recalling the conversation for me, added, “That got John’s attention.”

Odenweller planned to leave his collection in place for the rest of the show. His insurance agent, who had policies on a number of philatelists, said he might or might not be able to take Odenweller’s stamps home. But the agent decided to go to Australia instead of the United States, and approached du Pont about returning the collection to its owner.

Du Pont’s response was: “Sure, who does it belong to?”

The insurance agent told him, and du Pont said, “Odenweller. Does he have a brother named Charlie?”

He did. Du Pont remembered Charlie Odenweller from pistol shoots they had conducted a few years earlier in eastern Pennsylvania. And so du Pont agreed to carry Robert Odenweller’s stamps home.

Du Pont soon invited Odenweller to Pennsylvania, sending a helicopter for him, and showed Odenweller around. It was Odenweller’s introduction to the world du Pont inhabited when he was not trying to be an athlete. It was the world of du Pont the collector.

The mansion du Pont and his mother shared may have looked like Madison’s Montpelier, but Madison never installed a bank-vault door just off the main floor. Du Pont did, to seal off a large room that held a museum-quality diorama that looked like a slice of unspoiled Pennsylvania woods, with stuffed deer and other items not sent to the museum that housed his seashells and birds. The room also had a movie screen that dropped from the ceiling when du Pont wanted to watch first-run movies from Hollywood.

The walls were lined with reminders of du Pont’s successes in philately. While his mother’s horsemanship trophies were downstairs for everyone to see, the ribbons and certificates that du Pont accumulated were relegated to this room. He only had to look up to see how good he was, how well he had done at this stamp show or that exhibition. Over the years, he did very well indeed: he won more grand prix awards than anyone in the United States. The grand prix awards are the best of the best of the best; only collectors who have won multiple gold medals in international exhibitions are eligible for grand prix awards.

But even with the bank-vault door, du Pont did not keep the one-cent magenta in the mansion. It lay in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in which du Pont was the largest safe-deposit customer, and he drove Odenweller there to look at the stamp. Just outside the vault, at a narrow counter, du Pont opened his safe-deposit box. There, on a card, sat the rarest, most expensive stamp in the world. Du Pont picked it up, but the one-cent magenta fell to the floor. Du Pont offhandedly reached to retrieve it with his bare fingers. Odenweller blanched, careful collector that he is, and distressing thoughts flashed through his mind: What if dirt or sweat from du Pont’s hands damaged it? Worse, what if it tore?

In an instant, Odenweller waved off du Pont and picked up the stamp with a pair of small tongs that he always carried in a pocket. Thus began a relationship that lasted nearly thirty years and included prison visits in which Odenweller delivered news from Stamp World.

Odenweller and du Pont had more in common than stamps. They were close in age, and Odenweller excelled in things that mattered to du Pont: flying, shooting, and wrestling.

Still, du Pont had a way of compartmentalizing the people he brought into his life. Odenweller was a “stamp person,” and du Pont did not want a “stamp person” mingling with the others he invited to the estate. Du Pont told Odenweller not to mention his philately to the people he met when he visited. “I was to dissemble to a degree, just to keep them in the dark as to what I was doing, why I was there,” Odenweller told me. “I’d just say, ‘I’m down here, just a friend of John’s,’ or something like that.” Du Pont also insisted on secrecy in the outside world. Once, when du Pont and Odenweller had lunch before a stamp sale in Manhattan, du Pont worried that they would be seen together when they arrived at the auctioneer’s. “You and I shouldn’t appear to get off the elevator at the same time,” he told Odenweller. And above all, despite his wrestling background, Odenweller was supposed to remain separate from the wrestlers who lived on du Pont’s estate—Dave Schultz among them.

Du Pont and Odenweller were close enough, though, that du Pont’s mother said du Pont looked on Odenweller as the brother du Pont never had. She told Odenweller, “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to John. You’ve done what he wants to do. You don’t need anything from him. Everybody else is trying to get something.” At du Pont’s wedding in 1983, it was Odenweller who escorted du Pont’s mother down the aisle as the ceremony began. (Du Pont filed for divorce after ten months, and his ex-wife sued for $5 million. She alleged that he had not only tried to shove her into a fireplace but had threatened her with a gun.)

Odenweller’s flying skills were a particularly appealing calling card—and another part of their lives that showed how different he and du Pont were. After the Air Force, Odenweller had risen through the ranks at TWA, putting in his time, just as he had put in his time with stamps and stamp collecting. Du Pont had bought his way into flying, just as he had bought his way into philately—acquiring whole collections the way Ferrary and Hind had, and then filling in the gaps. Du Pont had purchased a helicopter and, with a pilot on his payroll, had learned to fly it.

One Christmas Eve in the 1980s, TWA assigned Odenweller to fly to Baltimore, about a hundred miles from du Pont’s estate. Odenweller, chatting with du Pont a few days before, said that he was facing a two-day layover. Du Pont asked what Odenweller planned to do for Christmas. Odenweller, contemplating a holiday in a hotel, told him: “There’s not much you can do except stare at the walls and watch TV until you get bored.” Du Pont’s response was immediate: “I’m going to come get you. I’ll bring you up here.”

Odenweller landed the Boeing 727 and walked to the office where pilots file their flight plans. There stood du Pont, wearing his “chief of helicopter police” uniform. Together they crossed the tarmac to the place where du Pont had parked his helicopter, and soon they were in the air, on the way to du Pont’s estate. Odenweller told me it was an eye-opening visit. He witnessed “the people who worked on the property coming to the landowner—you know, I’m talking medieval times now, coming up with little gifts” for du Pont and his mother. Maybe the rich are different, but not when it comes to gift wrap. Odenweller watched as the du Ponts saved the wrapping paper from each little package, and also the ribbon.

On December 26, du Pont flew the helicopter to Baltimore in time for Odenweller to go back to work.

The other person who figured in the life of du Pont and his stamps was Taras M. Wochok, a lawyer who eventually became the unlikely guardian of the one-cent magenta. But that came later, much later, long after Wochok had lost track of Mr. Ducylowicz.

Wochok’s parents helped Ukrainians who had been held in displaced-person camps in World War II find homes in their North Philadelphia neighborhood— Wochok told me his mother sponsored nearly two hundred Ukrainian immigrants who arrived in the late 1940s. Ukraine had been victimized by the Nazis, who imposed forced labor on Jews and non-Jews alike. After the war, the Soviets sent, involuntarily, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in Germany back home, but eighty to eighty-five thousand left for the United States.

Wochok’s mother welcomed the new arrivals, offering them a bedroom until they found places of their own. Most stayed only a couple of days. But one remained for several years—Mr. Ducylowicz, a man in his late fifties who worked in the print shop of a Ukrainian-1anguage newspaper for a while. As a teenager, Wochok also worked at the newspaper, translating articles from Ukrainian to English and English to Ukrainian. There was a definite formality in the Wochok household, and Wochok, who was six or seven when the man moved in, was taught to address him as “Mister Ducylowicz.” Decades later, Wochok still referred to him that way, not as “George,” which was his first name. Sitting in the conference room of his law office, Wochok taught me how to pronounce Ducylowicz—“doots-uh-LOW-vitch”—and talked about how Ducylowicz had introduced him to philately.

Wochok told me he had spent hours watching Ducylowicz sift through his stamps, which were mainly from Germany. Ducylowicz told him that six or seven was a good age to begin collecting and even suggested stamps Wochok could start with. For a while, Wochok haunted stationery stores in the neighborhood, buying packets of canceled stamps from metal racks on the counter. But stamp collecting did not take. Wochok found the process too time-consuming, too isolating. “Baseball cards are one thing,” he told me. “Stamps are quite another.”

Wochok went on to college at La Salle University in Philadelphia and law school at the University of Notre Dame, and to a career as a prosecutor. By the early 1970s, he was an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia under Arlen Specter, a Democrat-turned-Republican who was serving his second term as the district attorney in Philadelphia. In 1973, Specter put Wochok in charge of his campaign for a third term. Wochok figured that if things went well, he would be tapped to manage Specter’s campaign for governor the following year, or at least to play a major role in it. But on Election Day, things did not go well: Specter lost, though he was later elected to the United States Senate. Wochok went job-hunting, signing on with a medium-size suburban law firm.

As a prosecutor, he had become friendly with Dr. Halbert Fillinger, a forensic pathologist who was an assistant medical examiner in Philadelphia and knew John E. du Pont. He told Wochok that du Pont had a lot of legal work.

Fillinger introduced them in the spring of 1973. Wochok said he could not handle outside legal work while he was still on Specter’s payroll. But he told du Pont that he could give him second opinions on specific questions—friendly advice, really, at no charge.

Soon du Pont was inviting Wochok to the mansion every few weeks. The schedule never varied: cocktails were served at six o’clock and dinner at seven, and there was conversation after that. Those evenings were Wochok’s introduction to the kind of opulence he, like Odenweller, had never been aware of. One night in 1974 or 1975, du Pont said, “After a dinner like that, we ought to have a nice after-dinner drink.” Du Pont led the way to the basement and through a bank-vault door.

“My first thought is, this is improbable, to see a safe in a basement,” Wochok told me, “but, you know, he’s got a lot of money—I guess I can understand it, except that I didn’t see anything of any value in there except cases of liquor.” Du Pont said some of them had been there for as long as he could remember—some had come from relatives who had died. He pulled out a brandy from 1864. “That’s followed up with a visit maybe a month or two later when he hands me a bottle,” Wochok recalled. “He says, ‘Here, take this,’ and it’s a bottle of champagne from the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary.”

Forty years later, Wochok still had that bottle of champagne, and it remained unopened. (Victor Krievins told me that du Pont had also given him a bottle, and that when he finally popped the cork, it was undrinkable.)

Du Pont followed Wochok from one law firm to another, assigning him more and more work. Some years, du Pont accounted for 80 percent of Wochok’s billable hours; other years, far less. But du Pont was as secretive with Wochok as he was with Odenweller, and did not tell Wochok everything he was up to. Du Pont did not mention his philately until Wochok had been his lawyer for several years, and not because there was a dispute about stamps but because du Pont wanted a traveling companion. He called Wochok and asked if he were free the following afternoon. Wochok checked his calendar and said he was, and du Pont said, “OK, we’re going to Toronto.” Wochok asked how long they would stay, and du Pont said, “Oh, we’re just going up and back.” Wochok figured that with commercial flights, they would have to spend the night in Toronto, and told du Pont he could not go—he had appointments the following morning that he could not reschedule. Du Pont said Wochok could make the trip and still see his clients in the morning. “He said, ‘I’ve got the Lear. We’re going to take the Lear.’”

Off they went in du Pont’s private jet. They spent an hour looking at stamp exhibits. They put in an appearance at a late-afternoon reception. “He said, ‘OK, we’re out of here,’” Wochok recalled. “Next thing I know, we’re back on the Lear, back home, and I’m in my house by seven o’clock at night.”

At some point, du Pont confided to Wochok that he owned the rarest stamp in the world. Wochok told me he was wonder struck: “This was so much more impressive and so much more significant and so much more important that I remember thinking, ‘Gee, if I’d have maybe collected some stamps and spent some time meticulously collecting them, maybe I would’ve found something somewhere along the way.” It is the dream boys had even before little Louis Vaughan.

Du Pont’s eccentricities worsened with his descent into mental illness in the 1990s. He fired a gun at the ceiling while changing a light bulb. He believed his estate was filled with mechanical trees that slid across the land on orders from unseen remote controllers. He believed there were tunnels beneath the mansion that people used to come and go without being seen. (In fact, there was one tunnel, four hundred feet long, from the main house to the powerhouse, and it was du Pont who would use it during his standoff with the police after he shot Dave Schultz.) He was so suspicious he decided Jean could not have been his mother. His “real” mother had been a maid who he believed had had an affair with his father and had been buried outside the mansion. He ordered a plot dug up. “Of course no bones were found,” the reporters Bill Ordine and Ralph Vigoda wrote in their book about the Schultz case.

Inside the mansion, du Pont was so sure that people were walking behind the walls that he paid one of the wrestlers who lived on the estate to do just that, to prove it could be done. Someone who wasn’t paranoid—or rich, with a retinue that never said no—would simply have called in an exterminator to set out traps for mice.

Du Pont was turning into “a Howard Hughes—type figure: long, greasy hair, unkempt beard, his teeth literally rotting in his mouth,” Ordine and Vigoda wrote. “Frequently, he did not shower.” But he could just as easily appear normal, even charming. There was no telling which he would be, the sane du Pont or the insane du Pont.

The sane du Pont went shopping in a stamp store on the afternoon of January 26, 1996. The man behind the counter who waited on him was Steve Pendergast, a onetime insurance broker who had decided that selling stamps was “a much more interesting way of spending my time.” The first time Pendergast handled a du Pont transaction, he dealt with an assistant named Georgia, who picked up an expensive stamp album and some stamps from the store. Before long, she called and told Pendergast the album was unacceptable. Then Pendergast got another call that began, “This is John.” Pendergast realized who was on the line, and a philatelist himself, he felt his pulse quicken. Pendergast knew that du Pont owned the unique one-cent magenta along with thousands of other important stamps, “but he never talked about it, so I didn’t talk about it.”

Pendergast told me that du Pont “couldn’t have been more normal” as he left the store that January afternoon. Du Pont told him he would be back on Monday to pick up yet another stamp album.

The insane du Pont shot Dave Schultz less than two hours later. When Pendergast first heard there had been a shooting at du Pont’s estate, he figured someone had tried to kill du Pont, not that du Pont himself had been the gunman.

Du Pont never saw the one-cent magenta again, except perhaps on television while he was in prison. A cable program did a segment on du Pont and the stamp, and du Pont’s cellblock buzzed about the famous prisoner with the famous stamp. Wochok told me that du Pont enjoyed the attention.

The film Foxcatcher was less flattering. It is mostly about du Pont’s fascination with athletes and athletics, his wealth and his deranged behavior—and his murder of Dave Schultz. Stamp World had a problem with the one scene that refers to du Pont’s stamps.

It is the scene in which du Pont’s helicopter takes off from the lawn of his mansion. Du Pont and Dave Schultz’s brother Mark are aboard, and du Pont hands him the pages of a speech he has written for Mark Schultz to read at an event at which du Pont is to receive an award.

Du Pont is intent on rehearsing the speech, which calls for Schultz to name du Pont’s accomplishments: “ornithologist, author, world explorer, philatelist.” But Schultz cannot say those highfalutin words. He pronounces the first one “orny-thologist.” The last one stops him completely. “Fuh-lay” is all he can manage.

“Stamps,” du Pont says, by way of explanation.

“Can we say ‘stamps’?” Schultz asks.

“No,” du Pont says, sounding stern. He has chosen the word he wants Schultz to say, chosen it deliberately, and he is determined to make him say it. “Philatelist.”

Schultz is nervous about standing at a lectern and speaking to a crowd, and du Pont compounds Schultz’s jitters by saying that the audience at the dinner will number four hundred. Du Pont snorts cocaine and invites Schultz to try some. “Well, I’m not so sure that’s such a good idea,” Schultz says.

Du Pont looks annoyed. Schultz inhales the cocaine, but du Pont has already gone back to rehearsing the speech. And, as usual, du Pont wants perfection.

“Fuh-LAY-tuh-list,” Schultz stammers.

“Smoother,” du Pont commands.

Soon Schultz is tackling the string of nouns, but he skips a few. Du Pont wants nothing left out, and launches into a pronunciation drill as if he were an instructor coaching the laggard in the class.

“Or-nuh-THAH-luh-gist, fuh-LAY-tuh-list, fuh-LAN-thruh-pist,” du Pont says. “Again.”

In Stamp World, the problem was not the cocaine but the long A. Steve Carell, the actor who played du Pont, did not pronounce the word as prescribed by every dictionary since the word philately took its place in Webster’s Supplement of New Words in 1880, with an A that rhymes with “cat.”

ELEVEN

$9.5 MILLION

2014: “I Expected to See Magenta, and I Saw Magenta”

I understand you want to have a conversation with the person who bought the stamp. I will leave you my number,” the message on my voice mail began. The voice was a man’s: deep, powerful, and commanding, one that would have carried to the balcony in a theater or sustained a long career in radio or television.

“Zero one one, as I’m calling you from overseas,” he said, but he sounded like a New Yorker on a cell phone. He recited a twelve-digit number that began with the country code for Spain.

When I called back, he answered on the first ring. He said his name was Stuart Weitzman.

Yes, the Stuart Weitzman who has designed strappy gladiator sandals, sultry thigh-high boots, and dozens of other shoes. The Stuart Weitzman whose creations have been photographed on Kate Moss in ads and Kate Middleton in paparazzi shots—and on Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Charlize Theron. The Stuart Weitzman who refers to first ladies by their first names: “Michelle has bunches of our shoes,” he told me.

He is also the Stuart Weitzman who was once a boy in Queens with a couple of stamp albums—and who stared at the empty space for the one-cent magenta.

Now, for nearly a year, the man behind a best-selling sandal known as the Nudist had owned that stamp, which is barely big enough to cover the birthmark on a supermodel.

After du Pont died in prison in 2010, liquidating du Pont’s holdings kept Taras Wochok busy. He arranged the sale of Foxcatcher Farm to a real-estate developer. The house that Dave Schultz and his family had lived in was leveled, as was du Pont’s athletic training center, but du Pont’s mansion was not. It became a clubhouse and— ironically—the fitness center for a new gated community.

When Wochok turned to selling off du Pont’s possessions, the one-cent magenta was a priority item. Wochok consigned the rest of du Pont’s collection to a philatelic auction house in Geneva. The one-cent magenta did not go there. Nor did he send it to an American firm that specialized in stamps like Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, which had once counted du Pont as its number one customer. He entrusted it to one of the big names in the auction world—and, specifically, to one man at that firm: David Redden of Sotheby’s.

I saw Wochok at the auction, but not the buyer. Redden told me that the person who bought the one-cent magenta did not want to be identified. Protecting a buyer’s privacy is not unheard of at high-profile auctions, and at first Redden would not even say whether the buyer was a man or a woman. This complicates matters for reporters like me, trying to write a newspaper article about a record-breaking sale without knowing which pronoun to use. Redden slipped up this time and said something about “him,” so it was a man. The collectors on the salesroom floor tried to guess who had the best poker face—that is, who was not admitting that he was the new owner. A few had bid in the early stages, but they shook their heads when I asked, jokingly, if they had arranged a private signal with Redden that let them stay in the running after they put down their paddles. They rolled their eyes when I said something about bidding by telepathy.

They did not see Weitzman. Neither did I, and I wouldn’t have recognized him—I’m not a regular at fashion shows or Oscar-night after-parties. But he was there, above it all. Weitzman told me on the phone from Spain that he had sat through the auction behind the curtains of a skybox at Sotheby’s, which is why no one in the crowd noticed him. And he told me that it was not his first time in a skybox there. He told me about being outbid at another Redden auction, and I wondered if he was the mystery owner of a 1933 “double eagle” gold coin. Like the one-cent magenta, it was one of a kind, the only 1933 double eagle that was not melted down and disposed of when the United States went off the gold standard. Redden sold it for $7.59 million in 2002, at the time the highest price ever paid for a coin.

A unique object, sold by Redden to an anonymous bidder. It sounded like something that would appeal to the buyer of the one-cent magenta. And Weitzman knew too much about the lengths to which the New-York Historical Society had gone to display the precious coin.

Weitzman told me that he pretty much gave up stamp collecting in his late teens. In college he studied real estate and accounting, and aspired to be what he called “one of these geniuses on Wall Street.” But drawing and painting had been a hobby, and he sketched some shoes when he was an undergraduate that got noticed—first by a classmate, who showed the sketches to his father, a shoe manufacturer. The father called Weitzman in and asked where Weitzman had copied them from.

“Nowhere,” Weitzman said. “I didn’t copy them.”

The father ripped up one of the sketches and told Weitzman to draw it. He did. The father bought the rest of Weitzman’s sketches at $25 apiece and started making shoes from Weitzman’s designs. Weitzman figures that he made $12,000 drawing shoes while he was in college—although, as he told the story nearly fifty years later, he was still annoyed he had never been paid for the sketch he had to redraw.

He forgot about the Wall Street career, but he never forgot about the one-cent magenta. He heard about the coming sale from Redden. They knew each other from past auctions, none involving stamps. Redden said the one-cent magenta was being consigned from, as Weitzman described it later, “the estate of this guy who was in prison”—du Pont—and eventually it would be put up for sale. Was Weitzman interested? “Of course I was,” Weitzman said. He lined up some partners, but after they dropped out, he decided to go all in and bid on his own.

And then Redden showed him the stamp. “It took me back to my childhood,” Weitzman told me. “It was sort of like going back to the house I grew up in”—which he did once, in the 1990s. “I thought I grew up in this giant house—when you’re six, you’re seven, it’s all you know, but of course it wasn’t when I was fifty and I took my kids to see it.”

The stamp also looked tiny. He took in the color, and dismissed the naysayers who complained that the stamp had faded almost beyond recognition. “I expected to see magenta, and I saw magenta, darkened over time, but it was magenta,” he said. “I wouldn’t call it bordeaux, burgundy, red, or fuchsia. It was magenta, it is magenta.”

From past auctions, he had learned to play down Redden’s numbers. “He puts out these estimates. I said to him, ‘David, it’s not going to get close to ten million.’ He said, ‘No, it’s at least fifteen, it may go to twenty.’” This was Redden’s pre-auction salesmanship, trying to get likely bidders so excited that they would send more than they were inclined to spend.

In the end, Weitzman’s calculus was better than Redden’s—the price was not that far from $10 million, but nowhere near $15 million. “When it hit eight, there were only two people left, and that guy didn’t want it as much as I did,” Weitzman told me.

“Or he didn’t have that childhood album that had stuck with him for sixty years.”

His older brother had tried stamp collecting, and Weitzman picked up where he had left off, using the same albums, “partially filled up with easy-to-find stamps.” His hobby took on an urgency when he broke his leg playing baseball in the street. “I made a really fantastic catch on a deep fly ball off the handle of a shovel—that’s how you got your best bats, you cut off your father’s snow shovel hoping he never found out,” he said. “I caught this ball one-handed, and when I landed, my foot landed on the curb but my heel went down to street level. That snapped the bone that connects the ankle to the shin, but I held on to the ball. I was so proud of hanging on to that ball.”

It was such a bad break that he finished the school year at home. He was not going to live out the cliché about all work and no play, but he could not play in the street, so he played with stamps, even sending his mother to the post office to buy whole sheets of new issues. “I started filling albums with things I could find—once in a while, things you thought were worth a penny were worth fifty dollars,” he said.

He knew what the one-cent magenta looked like from the image in his hand-me-down album. He knew what it was from a comic book.

Donald Duck and the Gilded Man was published in 1952, when Weitzman was ten. It had an operatically complicated plot that sent Donald Duck and his nephews to Guiana in search of the one-cent magenta. There they hired a helicopter to take them into the jungle, where, a reliable source had told them, they would find the man who had the stamp, Mr. El Dorado, the gilded man. Young comic-book readers might or might not have understood the playful twist on the name of the rich and surprisingly forgetful stamp collector Philo T. Ellic, whose name was a clumsy play on philatelic. But surely they were rooting against a conniving rival of Donald’s who turned out to be the sole heir of Miss Susiebell Gander. And of course the envelope bearing the stamp had been addressed to her.

Every page had some development that could induce a fresh fantasy in a boy’s mind, but Weitzman was realistic. He figured the comics were as close as he would ever come to the one-cent magenta. Years later, an art history professor in college said much the same thing to him about post-Impressionist paintings: “You will not own any of these, museums will. You will never get to own them.”

Weitzman was not interested in owning post-Impressionist paintings. But he took the words “you will never get to own them” as a challenge. Someday, he had to own the one-cent magenta.

Once he did, two things happened: he went looking for his boyhood stamp albums, and the overtures began—the overtures from museums that wanted to display the one-cent magenta.

He could not find the album with the blank space for that stamp, but he found his other album, which had had a blank space for the Inverted Jenny. Filling that space now presented a problem for Weitzman. It could hold only one Inverted Jenny, and not long after Weitzman bought the one-cent magenta, he acquired four, not just any four, but the plate block, a four-stamp square, the quartet from the original sheet that was next to the serial number of the printing plate—8493. On most plate blocks, the number is marginalia. Philatelists are passionate about marginalia, which they call selvage, but anyone can see its importance on this plate block. The digits, in blue, like the little airplanes, are upside down.

As for the feelers from museums about the one-cent magenta, Weitzman was secretive, just as he had been at the auction. He told Redden to tell officials at each museum nothing more than, “You’ll be getting a call from the owner’s representative.”

So Allen R. Kane, the director of the National Postal Museum in Washington, scheduled a meeting with a deep-voiced caller who gave his name as “Stuart Alan.” Kane told me he believed Stuart Alan was an adviser to the owner—an adviser no one at the museum had heard of. Maybe he was more of a business adviser than a philatelist, maybe a marketing type who could evaluate a plan for displaying the one-cent magenta and generating the publicity to bring in crowds. “I was told a team was going to come down,” Kane said. “I didn’t put one and one together.”

The museum occupies a block-square building built just before World War I as part of a master plan to revive sleepy Washington in ways that suggested Rome and Paris. Those were the days when post offices were temples—grand structures that imparted confidence in government. And the Washington post office was one of the grandest. As a museum, its collection includes six million objects, from tiny stamps to full-size mail trucks to the anthrax-laced letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in 2001.

Stuart Alan passed through the metal detectors inside the tall brass doors, and Kane led him into the main gallery. It was a fast-food restaurant after the building was decommissioned as a post office—philatelists marvel that Kane managed to reclaim it—and it is named for the hedge-fund billionaire William Gross, a stamp collector who was the major donor to the fund for its remodeling. The first time I visited the museum, in 2014, Kane was ebullient, racing through the gallery, showing me President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sketches for stamps. Those sketches, now brown ink on brownish paper, reminded me that I had read that FDR, a lifelong stamp collector, had “assumed complete control over stamp issues.” One year when he was in office, the Post Office even reported a million-dollar profit.

Kane also demonstrated a computer that took my photograph and put it on a replica of a stamp—my face, right-side up, where the Inverted Jenny belonged—and he asked me a question he had asked Weitzman: “What do you think was the biggest-selling American commemorative stamp?” On the wall was a poster of the thirty-two-cent Marilyn Monroe stamp from 1995. The power of suggestion being what it is, I gamely gave the same answer as Weitzman: Marilyn Monroe.

Wrong, Kane told me, probably with the same glee as when Weitzman had stood in the same spot. The record belongs to the twenty-nine-cent Elvis Presleys from 1993. (Two versions were issued. The portrait of Presley holding a microphone was the same on both. One said “Elvis Presley,” the other simply “Elvis.”)

Kane showed Weitzman an alcove where he wanted to install the one-cent magenta in a case with special lighting and special glass to keep the stamp from fading. Kane’s team talked about promoting the exhibition online. They talked about the museum’s technical specialists and, as Kane put it, “what we could do to clean it up or whatever.” Kane was succinct. “It’s kind of dark. We have the best paper conservators in town, and they’re ready to go.”

Kane’s team was puzzled about Stuart Alan and why he seemed preoccupied with shoes. “We have this one interactive display in the museum where you can do a search for any topic,” Ted Wilson, the museum’s registrar, told me. “He does a search for shoes—stamps with shoes on them. We’re looking at each other like, what’s with the shoes?” The top officials at the museum, Wilson said, were “a bunch of guys who have a limited knowledge of women’s shoes.”

Stuart Alan listened to their pitch and said he wanted the other person on his team—his executive vice president, Barbara Kreger—brought in. Someone asked where she was, and Stuart Alan instructed them to go to the street corner in front of the museum. A staffer went outside, and there she was, a stylish-looking woman carrying a small hard-shell case.

Just as they were clueless about Stuart Alan, they did not realize that she was the woman who had launched more than a million shoes, Weitzman’s output since he hired her in the late 1970s. “She has a model’s foot,” Weitzman told me, explaining that his designs don’t go into production without her approval. (In 2015 Weitzman’s company was owned by Coach, but he retained creative control over the shoes.)

Kane’s people found a chair and seated her next to Stuart Alan, who said, “You won.” Now Kane’s people were even more puzzled, until Ms. Kreger put the case on the table and they saw what was inside. She had had the one-cent magenta the whole time, and Stuart Alan— Stuart Alan Weitzman—finally came clean and identified himself as the owner.

Weitzman told me later that he had considered lending it to the British Museum. He said the curators there had offered to display the one-cent magenta in a gallery with an original copy of Magna Carta that drew 250,000 visitors a year, but London was too far away. Patriotism also tugged at him. “I’m American,” he said.

Besides, with 400,000 visitors a year, the postal museum packs in more people.

These days, stamps are museum exhibits, relics of a world that knew the world from stamps. Once, stamps were tantalizing because they had gone places. And they depicted places most people would never see: exotic destinations. “We can capture a giraffe stamp from Tanganyika, even if we cannot go there and shoot one, and we can trap a kookaburra bird for our stamp album even if we never see Australia,” Ellis Parker Butler observed in 1933. The writer William Styron recalled that “[d]uring the philatelic period of my late childhood,” he thrilled to the stamps from Greece and Guatemala in his album, but “none so arrested my imagination or so whetted my longing for faraway places” as Elobey, Annobón, and Corsico. He used the names of those far-off colonies in the Gulf of Guinea as the title of a short story that invoked a boyhood stamp album whose trophy was a stamp from those very islands. The story was about how the owner of a such a stamp album grew up to be “an unwilling visitor to one of those faraway places” as a soldier in World War II, how the dread of wartime drowned out the past, and how he longed to be back in his parents’ living room, “merely dreaming of one of those places rather than actually being in one.” The world conjured by stamps, the world of the imagination, was a better place.

Styron’s generation came of age when the United States had a philatelist-in-chief who, as a young man, “came to think of himself as cosmopolitan, and not just because his extensive stamp collection made him a whiz at geography.” As president, FDR’s stamp albums weighed down his luggage. And from 1910 to 1936, Britain had a king who longed to spend three afternoons a week with his stamp collection. Ivory soap sponsored a radio program for stamp collectors, and a few colleges added courses in philately to the curriculum. Those were the days, too, when New York City still had a stamp district, a short walk from City Hall and the church where George Washington began his first Inauguration Day in 1789. But the stamp dealers who populated Nassau Street (and advertised in magazines as seemingly unrelated as The New Yorker and Popular Mechanics) have disappeared. In 1994, the Subway Stamp Shop hauled away 250 tons of stamps and reinvented itself in Altoona, Pennsylvania. It has been 280 miles from the New York subway ever since.

Stamp collecting was once so popular that whole magazines devoted to stamps rolled off the presses, week after week or month after month, with articles that sounded as if they should have been master’s theses: “The Head of Queen Victoria on the Penny and Two-Penny Stamps” or “Winter Mail Service Across the Straits of Northumberland, From Prince Edward Island to the Mainland of New Brunswick.” Some sounded less abstruse. In 1941 a Los Angeles schoolteacher who was a well-known philatelist moved to Holton, Kansas—population three hundred—to take charge of a publication called Weekly Philatelic Gossip. Holton was “a very strategic place” for such a publication. Why? His explanation had the kind of complicated precision that a stamp lover would appreciate. Holton, Kansas, stood at “the intersection point of the diagonals of the United States, 1,700 miles from each corner—the northwest, the northeast, the southwest and the southeast.”

Stamp magazines hardly had the circulation or advertising base of the Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s. But like the Internet a couple of generations later, they reached the eyeballs their advertisers wanted to reach, even if they were tired eyeballs, eyeballs in need of magnifying glasses, and there were fewer and fewer of them. Weekly Philatelic Gossip went out of business in 1961; membership in the American Philatelic Society peaked in 1988 at nearly fifty-eight thousand. By the time Redden was selling the one-cent magenta, the society counted only thirty-two thousand members. “The ranks of hardcore collectors … are thinning,” The New Yorker magazine wrote in 2015. “For the young, postage stamps can hardly compete with smart phones.”

Kids don’t collect stamps the way they did in the 1950s and 1960s, when Weitzman was growing up. And no wonder. Stamps don’t deliver the action-adventure high of video games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown or Mass Effect 3. Stamps don’t come with sci-fi suits of armor or alien pals or command of your own spaceship, and stamps don’t let you rack up points for bashing what’s left of the human population with a supercharged wrench.

That may be. But the why-collect-stamps question was the wrong question because the one-cent magenta is different from other stamps and has been since the experts affirmed its uniqueness toward the end of the nineteenth century.

With that affirmation came a transformation. It was no longer an ordinary stamp, a disposable element on a newspaper that was itself disposable. From the 1870s on, the one-cent magenta was prized, tucked away in closely watched storage cabinets in palaces or vaults in banks. It fit the definition for collected objects prescribed by the cultural historian Philipp Blom in 2011. Such things “are like holy relics,” he wrote. “They have shed their original function and become totems, fetishes.” Whoever buys an object like the one-cent magenta is not seeking status, Blom added: “Real collectors are after something else … The real value of a piece lies not in its auction price, but in the importance it has in the collection.”

But what kind of collector is Stuart Weitzman? Surely, the one-cent magenta had an emotional pull—the boyhood story about the blank spot in his album was true— but Weitzman repeated what Redden had said about him just after the auction, that he was “not really” a stamp collector but a collector of one-of-a-kind objects. He favors Americana, but he is, above all, pragmatic. He found the one-cent magenta’s rarity compelling.

“These one-of-a-kind items will always be bought for more money by people who are not collectors in their relative industries,” Weitzman told me in 2016, “because we see them differently than a collector in that industry would see them.” He said that was how he landed the Inverted Jenny plate block. “No one in the [stamp] industry could match what I thought was the value,” he explained. Stamp collectors “saw it as a stamp, the only one.” He was willing to pay more, just as he had been willing to pay more for the one-cent magenta, because he thought of the plate block “not as a stamp but as one more of those one-of-a-kind Americana items.”

He asked if I’d like to see another unique item that he owned, one that “I’m really excited about.” Of course, I told him.

It was a pair of shoes. They looked like a pair my mother had when I was a child, a pair I thought had been elegant, with white fabric covering the midsection. The man who saw magenta in the one-cent magenta corrected me when I ventured that the toes and heels of his pair were everyday brown. “Cognac,” Weitzman said with authority, adding that the style was known in the shoe business as a “spectator pump.” My mother’s shoes, though, had not been autographed by the 1941 New York Yankees.

That was the season in which Joe DiMaggio had a fifty-six-game hitting streak. “He wasn’t married to Marilyn yet,” Weitzman explained, figuring that I would know he meant Marilyn Monroe. He probably also guessed that I would look up their marriage (it lasted all of 274 days, from January to October 1954).

In 1941, Weitzman told me, “he asked the woman he was with, ‘How would you like a baseball signed by all my teammates?’”

“She went like this,” Weitzman continued as he mimicked taking off one of his shoes, “and she said, ‘Would they sign my shoe?’”

Twenty-seven signatures take up space, even when they are small—more than there was on one of the shoes. She had to give DiMaggio both of them. He gave them back with names that I recognized: Lefty Gomez. Phil Rizzuto. DiMaggio, who was named the most valuable player that year. Even the catcher Bill Dickey, whose nickname was “the Man Nobody Knows.”

Weitzman turned over the shoes in his hands a couple of times. Then he explained why he had them: “In spite of millions of baseballs being signed, it’s the only shoe.” Like the one-cent magenta, the pair was unique.

I descended so far into Stamp World that I flew to London twice to retrace Redden’s steps and find out what made the one-cent magenta so special. On the second trip, I stood in the vault containing every British stamp but the one-cent magenta. “This is expected to be reference material,” the Keeper of the Royal Philatelic Collection, Michael Sefi, told me. The vault is shown only to serious students of philately, which I didn’t pretend to be, but it is not the only treat for someone who visits Sefi’s office in St. James’s Palace.

I had arrived on time, but the guard told me that Sefi was locked in. I looked alarmed, and the guard seemed to recognize the edgy expression of an American hearing a phrase that was close to lockdown. He smiled and explained that Sefi’s room was on the courtyard where the Changing the Guard ceremony was about to begin. The regiment that would take over at Buckingham Palace would muster in that courtyard. If I hurried, I could watch the pageantry, and Sefi would step out after it ended. The New Guard played fifes and drums as they marched away. Sefi said it was better when there was a full band.

Inside, we had a long conversation about the one-cent magenta, with some thrilling show-and-tell. Sefi pulled one of George V’s red albums from its shelf in the vault and carried it to a table in the bright room adjacent to the vault in which he works. He opened it to a page with the four-cent magentas from British Guiana that were issued in 1852. To me, still with the eyes of a stamp newbie, the color looked the same as the color of the one-cent magenta.

That moment was in my mind the following day, when I had lunch with Christopher Harman, the chairman of the Expert Committee at the Royal. He had a theory that the one-cent magenta had been printed on scraps of paper from earlier stamps sent to British Guiana— specifically, the margins of the sheets that originally contained the stamps from 1852 that Sefi had shown me.

This was fairly esoteric, but that did not stop us from spending nearly an hour speculating. And it didn’t stop me from spending another hour speculating with another authority, David Beech, a former president of the Royal who was the curator of the British Library’s philatelic collection for thirty years.

We will probably never know where the paper came from, just as we will probably never know about its cocoon phase, the time from its printing in British Guiana to its discovery by Louis Vernon Vaughan in his uncle’s abandoned house. But I found myself thinking about its storied afterlife—and about what makes something collectible, valuable, and enduring.

If the one-cent magenta had not gotten out of British Guiana when it did, it wouldn’t have been seen by the most influential eyes in philately.

If Edward Loines Pemberton had snapped it up when he had the chance, it wouldn’t have gotten to Philippe Arnold de la Renotiere von Ferrary, the collector to end all collectors, and it wouldn’t have become an object far beyond the means of most philatelists.

If Edward Denny Bacon had not declared it authentic, it would have been cast off as an album weed, as a fake or a forgery.

If Arthur Hind hadn’t been talked into buying it, if Small and Weinberg hadn’t seen its investment potential, if du Pont hadn’t shown up at the 1980 auction, the one-cent magenta would have led a less exalted life.

It has been a record-setter time after time not because it is a stamp but because it is the only one of its kind. That is what Weitzman understood. He did not care about the paper it was printed on, the celebrity factor that came with it, or the money that he spent to get it. What he wanted was the thing that no one else could have.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T his book began the way I described it in the “Stamp World” chapter, with a chance encounter at a cocktail party—and then I wrote a newspaper story about the one-cent magenta. That led me to Elisabeth Scharlatt and Amy Gash at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill—more about them later—and into Stamp World, as I came to call it.

If you are a Stamp World habitue, I know, I know, nobody uses benzene to assay stamps anymore—one accomplished philatelist showed up at my desk at the New York Times one day and did a demonstration of what I took to be a less volatile chemical, heptane. Besides, dunking the one-cent magenta in benzene wouldn’t have yielded the information David Redden probably thought the experts at the Royal Philatelic Society needed if they were to issue the certificate he wanted. But Redden’s mention of benzene captivated me, because for years my friend Tom Baker and I have chuckled at the only-i n-New-York memory of the neighbor who insisted that my landlord was storing a huge barrel of benzene in the basement of the building I lived in for a couple of years when I was in my early twenties.

Tom read an early version of the manuscript and offered his usual perceptive guidance, as did several other friends, notably Barbara Guss. Robert P. Odenweller, who is as sharp-eyed about stamps as he was in the cockpits of jets, was both a source and a helper, steering me away from potential turbulence as I skimmed over Stamp World. So was David Beech, who conducted what I felt were graduate-level seminars that were as much about history and technology—to name only two subjects that we discussed—as they were about philately in general and the one-cent magenta in particular.

I’m grateful to many other philatelists and philatelic experts on both sides of the Atlantic. I appreciated the cordial welcome at the Royal Philatelic Society London and the time that the Expert Committee’s chairman, Christopher G. Harman, spent in discussing theories about the committee’s work and the one-cent magenta. David Skinner at the British Library also provided expertise and guidance on reference materials, as did Michael Sefi, the curator of the Royal Philatelic Collection. At the National Postal Museum in Washington, the director, Allen R. Kane, was tireless and insightful at important moments, as were Ted Wilson, the registrar in the Collections Department; and Marty Emery, the museum’s manager of Internet affairs. Thomas Lera’s technical knowledge was enormously helpful. Matthew Healey offered ideas early on and opened doors at the Collectors Club in New York. Robert Rose of the Philatelic Foundation was considerate and perceptive. I enjoyed my encounters with Irwin Weinberg, who died about a month after I last saw him, and Stuart Weitzman, and I was pleased to reach Virginia Baxter, Carrie Hunter, and C. Ian C. Wishart, descendants of philatelists who figured in the story of the one-cent magenta.

At the New York Times, Carolyn Ryan, Wendell Jamieson, and Diego Ribadeneira were wonderful, as always—encouraging, inquisitive, and, when I needed it, indulgent. I also drew on help from any number of Times colleagues, among them Susan Beachy, Mark Bulik, Doris Burke, Laura Craven, Alain Delaqueriere, Emma G. Fitzsimmons, and Joan Nassivera. Thanks, too, to Warren Bodow, Wayne Bodow, Claude Giroux, Barbara Guss, Eben Price, Alison Shapiro, and Nina Shippen.

I marveled, time and again, at Elisabeth Scharlatt and Amy Gash—Elisabeth for seeing the possibilities in a story like this, Amy for seeing those possibilities through. She added a special incisiveness that’s reflected on every page. I’m indebted to many others at Algonquin, among them managing editor Brunson Hoole and copy editor Matthew Somoroff. Thanks to my agent, David Black, for doing what he does once again.

And then there’s the incomparable Jane, who understood from the beginning that that little smudge was important and put up with my descent into Stamp World.

NOTES

1. Stamp World

1

a first-time author Mike Offit, Nothing Personal: A Novel of Wall Street (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2014).

2

What a place for a book party Paul Goldberger, The City Observed (New York: Vintage, 1979), 227; Paul Porzelt, The Metropolitan Club of New York (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), 59-60; Paul R. Baker, Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White (New York: Free Press, 1989), 142-44.

3

one of the pianos from the movie Casablanca “A Star Piano’s Value As Time Goes By,” New York Times, December 14, 2012, A36, and “‘Casablanca’ Piano Is Sold for $602,500,” New York Times, December 15, 2012, A20.

3

the first book printed “For First Book Printed in English in New World, Let the Bidding Begin,” New York Times, November 16, 2013, A14, and “Book of Psalms Published in 1640 Makes Record Sale at Auction,” New York Times, Nov. 27, 2013, A20.

3

the same copy of the Declaration of Independence “He’s Auctioned the 1775 Declaration, Twice,” New York Times, July 4, 2000, B2.

4

“Get ready to freak out” “World’s Rarest Stamp Sets Auction Record,” Time online, June 18, 2014. http://time.com/2896879/worlds-rarest-stamp/.

5

“a fetishistic underworld” Sarah Hampson, “Notes from the Philatelic Underworld: How Stamps Are Undergoing a Revival,” The Globe and Mail, December 17, 2014, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/home-and-garden/design/notes-from-the-philatelic-underworld-how-stamps-are-undergoing-a-revival/article22118332/.

6

“Get your mind out of the gutter” “The Story of the First Stamp,” Smithsonian online, July 19, 2013, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-story-of-the-first-postage-stamp-14931961/.

6

“It is a pity ” H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

6

I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/142410?redirectedFrom=philately#eid.

7

He mailed himself Deirdre Foley Mendelssohn, “The Eccentric Englishman,” The New Yorker, September 14, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-eccentric-englishman; http://www.wrbray.org.uk/.

7

start pedaling David Leafe, “The Man Who Posted Himself,” (Daily Mail, March 19, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2117448/Prankster-W-Reginald-Bray-tested-Royal-Mail-limits-exasperated-Hitler.html).

8

It had not been seen in public Talk by Daniel A. Piazza at the National Postal Museum, June 7, 2015.

8

it disappeared at a collectors’ convention Stanley N. Bierman, The World’s Greatest Stamp Collectors (Sidney, Ohio: Linn’s Stamp News, 1980), 33.

8

the ugliest stamp “Interim Stamp Uses 17 Words Just to Say 4 Cents,” New York Times, January 25, 1991, A18.

8

“a shoddy-looking thing” Alvin F. Harlow, Paper Chase: The Amenities of Stamp Collecting (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1940), 139.

9

“unsatisfactory to the aesthete” L.N. and Maurice Williams, Rare Stamps (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), 11.

9

“been through the wash” Alex Palmer, “The Remarkable Story of the World’s Rarest Stamp,” Smithsonian (online), June 4, 2015, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/remarkable-story-worlds-rarest-stamp-180955412/.

10

a mixture of red and purple Author interview and email exchange with Frank H. Mahnke, May 2015.

10

a shade called “Chili Pepper” Author interview with Ferne Maibrunn, May 2015.

11

the famous Inverted Jenny See George Amick, The Inverted Jenny: Money, Mystery, Mania (Sidney, Ohio: Amos Press, 1986).

12

under his pillow Author interview with Robert Odenweller, January 17, 2015.

12

his picture on a stamp from Redonda Ralph Vigoda, “Expressing Himself. Where Du Pont Literally Put His Stamp on Things,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 15, 1996, A1.

13

serving a thirty-year sentence Debbie Goldberg, “John du Pont Found Guilty, Mentally Ill,” Washington Post, Feb. 26, 1997, A1.

13

“How can I get him a pardon” Talk by Allen R. Kane at reception for Irwin Weinberg at the National Postal Museum, May 8, 2015, and author interview, April 6, 2016.

13

handcuffed to his wrist “Irwin Weinberg Got Attached to His $500,000 Treasure; Then He Found He Couldn’t Get Loose,” People, July 10, 1978, 43.

17

to be bogus Rob Haeseler, “1 cent Magenta pretender is fake, Says Royal,” Linns Stamp News, June 21, 1999, 1.

2. Travels With David

18

“All they told me was” “Magna Carta Is Going on the Auction Block, Scraggly Tail and All,” New York Times, September 25, 2007, B1.

19

it became the most expensive “Book of Psalms Published in 1640 Makes Record Sale at Auction,” New York Times, Nov. 27, 2013, A20.

19

Redden said he approached Author interview with David N. Red den, March 22, 2016.

19

When I told Wochok Author interview with Taras N. Wochok, January 19, 2015.

21

Ridley Scott’s thriller The Counselor Manohla Dargis, “Wildlife Is Tame; Not the Humans,” New York Times, October 25, 2013, C8.

22

invested in obscure books Royal Philatelic Society London, press release, July 1, 2014.

22

“We may be venerable” “Mission Statement of the Royal Philatelic Society London,” on the Society’s website in 2015. The two phrases were later dropped.

23

the Duke of York had been David Cannadine, George V: The Unexpected King (London: Allen Lane-Penguin Books, 2014), 31.

23

“it was in this hobby’’ John Gore, King George V: A Personal Memoir (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), 296.

23

“is said to have been interrupted” Monograph from Michael Sefi, “The Royal Philatelic Collection,” 5.

23

once read a paper “The First President of the Royal Philatelic Society, London,” The London Philatelist, December 1906, 287.

23

“showed a most interesting and valuable display” “Philatelic Societ ies’ Meetings,” The London Philatelist, December 1904, 79; Kenneth Rose, King George V (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), 41.

24

“mere scraps of paper” Quoted in David Cannadine, “Rose’s Rex,” London Review of Books, September 15, 1983, 4.

25

Still, the diplomat Rose, King George V, 41.

25

“I was that damned fool” “The Queen’s Own: Stamps That Changed the World,” National Postal Museum, 2004.

25

“the greatest gathering” Heritage Statement— 41 Devonshire Place West (London: Feilden + Mawson, December 2013), 13.

27

“Doubts have more than once” The Postage Stamps, Envelopes, Wrappers, Post Cards and Telegraph Stamps of the British Colonies in the West Indies, Together With British Honduras and the Colonies in South America (London: Philatelic Society, London, 1891), 39.

27

Sir John Wilson was well aware W.A. Townsend and F.G. Howe, The Postage Stamps and Postal History of British Guiana (London: Royal Philatelic Society London, 1970), 47.

28

Inside St. James’s Christopher Winn, I Never Knew That About Royal Britain (London: Ebury Press, 2012), 38.

29

The stamp collection is owned personally Author interview with Michael Sefi, March 30, 2016.

30

estimated in 2015 Camilla Tominey, “The Queen is worth £300 million but cash is tied up in art and … stamps,” Sunday Express, March 8, 2015; David McClure, Royal Legacy: How the Royal Family Have Made, Spent and Passed on Their Wealth (London: Thistle Press, 2015).

30

had never seen the actual one-cent Author interview with Michael Sefi, March 30, 2016.

31

”And, I think, satisfying [Sefi’] own curiosity” Author interview with David N. Redden, June 23, 2015.

32

“Theres always something” Interview with Michael Sefi, June 22, 2015.

32

he tamped them down Interview with Michael Sefi, March 30, 2016.

32

The Expert Committees command post Author visit to Royal Philatelic Society London, March 12, 2015.

34

The technology was perfected Author interview with David Tobin of Foster + Freeman, June 13, 2015.

36

“It was described in Bacon as rubbed” Author interview with Christopher G. Harman, March 12, 2015.

36

The mention of the rubbing Author interview with Matthew Healey, March 3, 2015.

38

His hand shook Author interview with Peter Lister, March 12, 2015.

38

“Here’s our patient” This section is based on author observations on the trip to National Postal Museum on April 17, 2014, and on later conversations with Redden, Odenweller, and Thomas M. Lera.

41

Lera, writing in a scientific journal Thomas M. Lera, Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia: Select Papers, 2010—2011 (Washington: Smithsonian Institutional Scholarly Press, 2012), 74—75.

43

“The cunning of Wilson” “Master Auctioneer,” Time, April 20, 1962, 76.

43

Wilson turned a sale of post-impressionist paintings Carol Vogel, “Theater in the Salesroom,” New York Times Book Review, July 5, 1998, Section 7, 17.

45

“This is like a horse race” Author interview with David N. Red den, June 17, 2014.

45

But actually, it was over This section is based on author observations before, during, and immediately after the sale on June 17, 2014.

47

uninspiring wording Holland Cotter, “On the Scene: ‘The Contemporaries,’ ‘Painting Now’ and More,” New York Times Book Review, June 25, 2015, BR18.

47

Sotheby’s had prequalified Author interview with David N. Redden, August 3, 2015.

3. 1856: Printed, Sold, and Forgotten

49

the Post Office Mauritius stamps See Helen Morgan, Blue Mauritius: The Hunt for the World’s Most Valuable Stamps (London: Atlantic Books, 2009).

49

the Inverted Jenny stamps See George Amick, The Inverted Jenny: Money, Mystery, Mania (Sidney, Ohio: Amos Press, 1986).

49

One of the places Columbus missed Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983), 653.

50

Vespucci in 1499 Charles B. Parmer, West Indian Odyssey: The Complete Guide to the Islands of the Caribbean (New York: Dodge Publishing Company, 1937), 167.

50

A series of papal bulls W. Adolphe Roberts, Lands of the Inner Sea: The West Indies and Bermuda (New York: Coward-McCann, 1948), 159; Boorstin, 248.

51

Guiana “hath more quantity of gold” Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) and the Provinces of Emeria, Arromaia,Amapaia and other Countries, with their rivers adjoining, https://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1595raleigh-guiana.asp.

51

the Pilgrims weighed pointing the Mayflower Joshua R. Hyles, Guiana and the Shadows of Empire: Colonial and Cultural Negotiations at the Edge of the World (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013), 31. Some historians credit other early accounts with swaying the Pilgrims who favored going to Guiana. See, for example, Roland Greene Usher, The Pilgrims and Their History (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 47.

51

Back in London after a huge Paul Halsall, Modern History Source- book—Sir Walter Raleigh (1554—1618): The Discovery of Guiana, https://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1595raleigh-guiana.asp

51

in what they called Novo Zeelandia James Rodway, History of British Guiana, Volume 1 (Georgetown, Demerara: J. Thomson, 1891), 5.

51

“there were many advantages” Ibid., 5.

52

Finally the British Parmer, West Indian Odyssey, 168.

52

“The museum is somewhat superior” Roberts, Lands of the Inner Sea, 156.

52

“All first-class passengers” Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 20.

53

He had already “[raced]” James R. Kincaid, “250 Words Every Fifteen Minutes,” New York Times Book Review, December 22, 1991, 1.

53

“I think Saxony ” Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography of Anthony Trollope (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912), 43.

54

“incarnate gale of wind” Attributed to Wilkie Collins in Kincaid, New York Times Book Review, December 22, 1991, 1.

54

“There never was a land” Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859), 169, 170.

54

“among the mosquitoes!” Ibid., 181.

55

“philatelic facts, which are usually dry” Morgan, Blue Mauritius: The Hunt for the World’s Most Valuable Stamps, 31—40.

55

steamships picked up mail James Rodway, The Post Office in British Guiana Before 1860, booklet published in 1890, 7.

56

“let out the Office” The British Guiana: The World’s Most Famous Stamp (Sotheby’s pre-auction catalogue, 2014), 15; Townsend and Howe, 188.

57

“felt exploited by the Portuguese” George K. Danns, Domination and Power in Guyana: A Study of the Police in a Third World Context (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 1982), 21.

57

“Nobody expected any trouble” V.O. Chan, “The Riots of 1856 in British Guiana,” Caribbean Quarterly, March 1970, 40.

58

The little newspaper Townsend and Howe, 44.

59

misspelled as ”Patimus” The Stamp-Collector’s Magazine, March 1, 1870, 46.

59

despite tussles The British Guiana: The World’s Most Famous Stamp (Sotheby’s pre-auction catalogue, 2014), 16.

59

Dalton’s son took over Townsend and Howe, 189.

60

In a memoir Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, “Experiences During Many Years,” in The New England Magazine, July 1893, 619.

60

Shillaber liked one of the Gazette’s owners Ibid., 622.

61

the Gazette carried no such column The British Guiana: The World’s Most Famous Stamp (Sotheby’s pre-auction catalogue, 2014), 23.

61

probably ran off sheets of four Townsend and Howe, 48.

61

”Mr. Wight is still alive” The Postage Stamps, Envelopes, Wrappers, Post Cards and Telegraph Stamps of the British Colonies in the West Indies, Together With British Honduras and the Colonies in South America (London: Philatelic Society, London, 1891), 39.

4. 1873: Found by a Twelve-Year-Old

63

“The worst stamp swap” Viola Ilma, Funk & Wagnalls Guide to the World of Stamp Collecting (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978), 141.

63

grew up to be a tax collector The Official Gazette of British. Guiana, Volume 27 (1908), 223.

63

“was always referred to” Author interview with Carrie Hunter, December 14, 2015.

63

Andrew Hunter came from a line Author interviews with C. Ian C. Wishart, December 10, 2015, and with Carrie Hunter, December 14, 2015.

63

“a whole lot of old family letters” Quoted in Gerardine van Urk, “‘World’s Rarest Stamp on View,” New York Times, May 18, 1947, Section 2, 13.

64

“condition … would not be tolerated” L.N. and Maurice Williams, Rare Stamps (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), 11.

64

“I was quite certain” Quoted in The (Melbourne) Argus, July 21, 1934, 7.

64

The dealer was Alfred Smith Bertram Tapscott Knight Smith, How to Collect Postage Stamps (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1907), 157. See also Stamp Collector, May 25, 1903, 1.

65

The Timbre-Poste would later provide W.A. Townsend and F.G. Howe, The Postage Stamps and Postal History of British Guiana (London: Royal Philatelic Society London, 1970), 46.

65

The Persian emperor Mauritz Hallgren, All About Stamps (New York: Knopf, 1940), 17.

66

Centuries later Charlemagne Daniel B. Schneider, “F.Y.I.: Special Deliverers,” New York Times, June 3, 2001, Section 14, 2.

66

kings and bishops Carl H. Scheele, A Short History of the Mail Service (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970), 30; F. George Kay, Royal Mail: The Story of the Posts in England from the Time of Edward IV to the Present Day (London: Rockliff, 1951), 4.

66

fashioned a monopoly Hallgren, All About Stamps, 23.

67

A seventeenth-century entrepreneur “The Story of the First Postage Stamp,” Smithsonian, July 19, 2013, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-story-of-the-first-postage-stamp.

67

James E. Casey Wolfgang Saxon, “James E. Casey Is Dead at 95; Started United Parcel Service,” New York Times, June 7, 1983, B8.

67

”Just a penny” Duncan Campbell-Smith, Masters of the Post: The Authorised History of the Royal Mail (London: Penguin UK, 2011), 60.

68

The credit apparently goes F. George Kay, Royal Mail, 163.

69

Mail sent through Dockwra’s system Ibid., 164.

70

”unpleasant” Laurin Zilliacus, Mail for the World (New York: John Day, 1953), 153.

71

Smithsonian magasines website speculated “The Story of the First Postage Stamp,” Smithsonian, July 19, 2013, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-story-of-the-first-postage-stamp.

71

The philatelist David Beech Author interview with David Beech, March 29, 2016.

71

“Mr. Place, a prominent citisen” Zilliacus, Mailfor the World, 157.

72

on delivery was “an important incentive” Ian Jack, “The Rise and Fall of a Great British Institution,” The Guardian, November 22, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/22/masters -post-duncan-campbell-smith-review.

73

quoted the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S.T. Coleridge, Volume 2 (London: Edward Moxon, 1836), 114.

74

complained that “hundreds, if not thousands” Quoted in Eleanor C. Smyth, Sir Rowland Hill: The Story of a Great Reform—As Told by His Daughter (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907), 57.

74

detailed the ciphers Ibid., 58.

74

Franking was available Matthew F. Glassman, Franking Privilege: Historical Development and Options for Change (Washington: Congressional Research Service, April 2015), 2. See also Smyth, Sir Rowland Hill, 42—43.

75

complained that ”members of thefavoured classes” Smyth, Sir Row land Hill, 43.

75

mail “refused,, mis-sent or redirected” Ibid., 62.

76

friends in Parliament Hallgren, All About Stamps, 51.

76

Too foreign to the habits Zilliacus, Mail for the World, 161.

77

As the historian F. George Kay Kay, Royal Mail, 168.

77

“The lovely portrait” Ibid., 170.

80

Mackay wrote James Mackay, The Guinness Book of Stamps: Facts and Feats (Enfield, England: Guinness Superlatives, 1982), 216.

80

Or perhaps “timbrophily” Stephen Satchell and J.F.W. Auld, “Collecting and Investing in Stamps,” in Satchell, ed., Collectible Investments for the High Net Worth Investor (Oxford: Academic Press, 2009), 215.

81

Yahoo reported Vindu Goel and Joe Drape, “Yahoo Makes a Big Entrance Into Fantasy Sports Betting,” New York Times, July 8, 2015, B1.

81

“appeared to be a bad specimen” Quoted in Bertram W.H. Poole, “British Guiana 1¢ of 1856,” Mekeel’s Weekly, July 15, 1911.

82

Vaughan ”rose to the top” W.A. Townsend and F.G. Howe, Postage Stamps and Postal History of British Guiana (London: Royal Philatelic Society London, 1970), 48.

83

The lack of an apostrophe “Postage Stamp Design Errors” (website), http://topicsonstamps.info/errors/britishguiana.htm.

83

“Devoted philatelists” Simon Garfield, The Error World: An Affair with Stamps (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 4.

83

“Do we collect in order to touch” John Bryant, “Stamp and Coin Collecting,” in M. Thomas Inge (ed.), Handbook of American Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 1351.

84

”Of an evening” Inge (ed.), Handbook of American Popular Culture, xiii.

84

Mackay claimed Mackay, Guinness Book of Stamps, author bio, inside cover.

84

”It’s an obsession ” Author conversation with Joseph Hackmey at Royal Philatelic Society London, March 12, 2015.

84

For $1.1 million ”Most Expensive Newspaper Copy,” World Records Academy, http://www.worldrecordacademy.com/collections/most_expensive_newspaper_copy-Romanian_newspaper_sets_world_record_80272.htm.

85

the dentist who collected Michael Kimmelman, “Museums Built on the Passion to Collect … Anything,” New York Times, September 4, 1998, E27.

86

”Collecting fills a hole in a life” Garfield, The Error World: An Affair with Stamps, 2.

5. 1878: Glasgow and London

88

”among private letters” Arthur D. Ferguson, “The Rarities and Early Issues of British Guiana. The Romance of Their Discovery and Rise in Value,” British Guiana Philatelic Journal, December 1921, 4.

89

A middle-aged London barrister Who Was Who in Philately (London: Association of British Philatelic Societies Limited), http://www.abps.org.uk/Home/Who_Was_Who/index.xalter#H.

89

It was the world’s first Ibid., http://www.abps.org.uk/Home/Who_Was_Who/index.xalter#S.

89

a large library Kirstyn Leuner, “Francis John Stainforth: A Biographical Sketch,” (Boulder, Colorado: CU-Boulder University Libraries Special Collections, 2014), http://libpress.colorado.edu/stainforth/2014/12/14/francis-john-stainforth-a-biographical-sketch/.

89

plays and poems by women Stainforth, Francis John, Catalogue of the library of female authors of the Rev. J. Fr. Stainforth. Collection of the University of Colorado Boulder, http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/specialcollections/collections/wprp/290caption.htm.

89

Historians of philately Who Was Who in Philately, http://www.abps.org.uk/Home/Who_Was_Who/index.xalter#S.

90

a church asked L.N. and Maurice Williams, Rare Stamps (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), 14.

93

“its ponderous monographs” Fred J. Melville, “Edward Loines Pemberton—A Record of the Philatelic Activities of the Most Brilliant of the Pioneer Philatelists,” Philatelic Journal of Great Britain, October 1922, 176.

94

“mastered every minute peculiarity” “Edward Loines Pemberton,” The Philatelic Record, February 1879, 2.

94

the very first stamp auction Melville, Philatelic Journal of Great Britain, 186, 188.

94

“many others who were his seniors” “In Memoriam,” The Philatelic Record, February 1879, 2.

94

His Journal promised Advertisement in Edward L. Pemberton, The Stamp Collector’s Handbook (Dawlish: James R. Grant, and Plymouth: Stanley Gibbons, 1874).

94

“Ship with motto” Edward L. Pemberton, The Stamp Collector’s Handbook, 16.

95

“it [made] ones mouth water” Melville, Philatelic Journal of Great Britain, 179.

95

”There are collectors” Interview with Ted Wilson, January 21, 2016.

96

He wrote to Sir Edward Denny Bacon Quoted in Frederick A. Philbrick, “Further Notes on the Earlier Issues of British Guiana,” Philatelic Record, July 1889, 138.

97

Instead, according to the Williamses L.N. and Maurice Williams, “British Guiana’s 1c Magenta,” reprinted by David Feldman SA, 2014.

98

David Redden maintains Author interview with David Redden, March 12, 2015.

6. 1878: The Man in the Yachting Cap

100

”undoubtedly a love match” “A Crown Prince’s Bride,” New York Times, May 31, 1886, 2.

102

Philippe Arnold de la Renotiére von Ferrary Helen Morgan, Blue Mauritius, 70. The British stamp writers L.N. and Maurice Williams give his name as Philipp la Renotiére von Ferrary. L.N. and Maurice Williams, The Postage Stamp (New York: Penguin, 1956), 58. But later the Williamses note that at one point, he dropped “von Ferrary” and wanted to be known merely as Philipp la Renotiére. The Postage Stamp, 63.

102

He patronized one dealer Alvin F. Harlow, Paper Chase, 210.

102

”I would sooner buy” Quoted in Charles J. Phillips, “Philipp La Renotiére Von Ferrary: One of the Greatest Collectors,” Stamps, September 1932, 46.

104

Ferrary was known to cut Morgan, Blue Mauritius, 72.

104

“one of the few people” L.N. and Maurice Williams, The Postage Stamp , 61.

104

”When a good stamp fell into his collection” Harlow, Paper Chase, 54.

104

Ferrary wrote little The notable exception is “A Protest,” a letter to the editor of the Philatelic Record, reprinted in The Stamp News, January 1882, 97.

105

Ferrary’s excuse Morgan, Blue Mauritius, 80.

105

the artist Eugéne Atget “The Austrian Embassy, 57 rue de Va-renne,” J. Paul Getty Museum, http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/172716/eugene-atget-the-austrian-embassy-57-rue-de-varenne-french-1905/.

106

put bundles of cash on nails L.N. and Maurice Williams, The Postage Stamp, 61.

106

the stamp-shop clerks knew Morgan, Blue Mauritius, 80–81.

107

a syndicated newspaper article “Most Valuable Bit of Paper in the Whole World—Although Hardly More Than an Inch Square, Its Owner Would Not Take $15,000 For It,” Los Angeles Herald, October 28, 1906, 7.

109

If Ferrary was born in 1848 See, for example, Stanley N. Bierman, The World’s Greatest Stamp Collectors, 23. But Helen Morgan, in Blue Mauritius, maintains that he was “probably” born in 1850.

109

the collected works Harlow, Paper Chase, 52.

109

heard Ferrary’s parents quarreling Stanley N. Bierman, The World’s Greatest Stamp Collectors, 24.

110

On the same page “The Sacrifice of a Duke,” New-York Tribune, December 3, 1893, 15.

111

The stamp writer Fred J. Melville Quoted in Morgan, Blue Mauritius, 80.

111

“Look sharp, for Gawd’s sake!” Quoted in L.N. and Maurice Williams, The Postage Stamp, 58.

111

Ferrary had taken up stamps Barth Healey, “Pastimes: Stamps, ”New York Times, May 13, 1990, Section 1, 46.

113

some philatelists tallied and toted Harlow, Paper Chase, 54.

113

”’a Parisian collection’” L.N. and Maurice Williams, The Postage Stamp , 60.

113

Ferrary played the part Stanley N. Bierman, The World’s Greatest Stamp Collectors, 39.

114

His will said Sir John Wilson, The Royal Philatelic Collection (London: Dropmore Press, 1952), 25.

114

specifically, to the Reichspost Museum ”The World’s Greatest Rarity,” Rarities of the World 1970 (New York: Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, 1970), 23.

115

The philatelic writer Kent B. Stiles Quoted in “British Guiana Stamp of 1856 Still the ‘World’s Rarest,’” Scott’s Monthly Stamp Journal, May 1970, 75.

117

the Mahés—“father and son” Townsend and Howe, Postage Stamps and Postal History of British Guiana, 48.

118

Redden’s pre-sale catalogue The British Guiana: The World’s Most Famous Stamp (Sotheby’s pre-auction catalogue, 2014), 45.

7. 1922: The Plutocrat with the Cigar

120

”was never publicly identified” Kent B. Stiles, Stamps: An Outline of Philately (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), 320.

121

He put his signature Author interview with David N. Redden, March 12, 2015. Redden and his colleagues at Sotheby’s failed to turn up any of Hind’s cards before the sale of the one-cent magenta in 2014.

121

The story about the second stamp “A Second One Cent British Guiana?” Stamp and Cover Collectors’ Review, October 1938, 261–63.

123

So what There is no way to know. The magazine’s last issue was published in 1939, and the editors, August Dietz and August Dietz Jr., are long dead; August Dietz’s great-grandson told me that the magazine’s files were discarded in the 1960s. August Dietz would have known that Hind liked his cigars. In the same issue, Dietz mentioned that he had visited Hind in Utica and that Hind had presented him with “a Pennsylvania ‘stogie’ that he tried to have me smoke.” Apparently, Dietz was no more of a cigar smoker than the man with the second stamp.

123

“He had more money than knowledge” Sir John Wilson, The Royal Philatelic Collection (London: Dropmore Press, 1952), 26.

124

He himself repeated “Penny Stamps That Are Worth Thousands,” The Queenslander, February 16, 1938, 40.

124

“The difficulty in showing” Wilson, The Royal Philatelic Collection, 27.

125

described him as “headstrong” Alvin F. Harlow, Paper Chase, 141.

125

“opinionated, cynical and strong-minded” Stanley N. Bierman, The World’s Greatest Stamp Collectors, 145.

125

“The unfortunate side” Quoted in L.N. Williams, Encyclopaedia of Rare and Famous Stamps, Volume 2 (Geneva: David Feldman, 1992), 27.

125

the Ferrary of America “America’s Biggest Stamp Collector,” New York Times, November 7, 1922, 27.

125

“[AJs [Brown] had no knowledge” L.N. and Maurice Williams, Stamp Collecting (New York, Penguin, 1956), 76.

126

Hind glued many of his stamps George H. Sloane, “Arthur Hind at the Collectors Club,” Collectors Club Philatelist, 1923, 142.

126

“we do not think” “Death of Mr. Arthur Hind,” London Philatelist, March 1933, 65.

126

“la piéce de résistance” Quoted in Mauritius [auction catalogue] (Geneva: David Feldman, 1993), 92.

127

Even A.J. Sefi A.J. Sefi, “Mr. Arthur Hind,” Philatelic Journal of Great Britain, March 1933, 46–47.

127

Sefi—a distant cousin of Michael Sefi Author interview with Michael Sefi, March 30, 2016.

129

”thrifty, hard-headed” David H. Beetle, Along the Oriskany (Utica, N.Y.: Utica Observer-Dispatch, 1947), 155.

129

not the Horatio Alger story it appeared to be A. J. Sefi, Philatelic Journal of Great Britain, 46.

129

Hind moved to the United States Some accounts say that Hind arrived in 1891, though A.J. Sefi gives the date as 1890.

129

more often a mediator Kevin Phillips, William McKinley (New York: Times Books-Henry Holt, 2003), 146.

131

”little town with the big red-light district” Harold Faber, “Hudson Casts New Light on Its Red-Light Past,” New York Times, October 21, 1994, B6.

131

Clark Mills, New York, ”a place” Charles J. Phillips, “Arthur Hind—Owner of the World’s Highest Priced Stamp,” Stamps, Vol. 1, No. 8, 1932, 261.

131

a ”virtual ghost town” Clifford Morris, A Brief History of Clark Mills, www.clintonchamber.org/history.cfm.

132

Edmund Morris described Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 1979), 240.

132

that was soon rechristened ”Arhipaca” Eugene E. Dziedzic and James S. Pula, New York Mills (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2013), 85; and “Arhipaca Opens to Public Today,” Rome Daily Sentinel, April 19, 1930, 8.

132

Harrison had heard A.J. Sefi, Philatelic Journal of Great Britain,46.

132

”Despite his great wealth ” Stanley N. Bierman, The World’s Greatest Stamp Collectors, 145.

133

”didn’t want a cripple in his collection” Harlow, Paper Chase, 141.

133

echoed that idea Wilson, The Royal Philatelic Collection , 26.

133

“repeatedly pointed out” Stanley N. Bierman, The World’s Greatest Stamp Collectors, 145.

133

no more diplomatic George H. Sloane, “Arthur Hind at the Collectors Club,” Collectors Club Philatelist, 1923, 142.

135

Thanksgiving Day “Ann Leeta M’Mahon Weds Arthur Hind,” Utica Daily Press, November 26, 1926, 3; “A. Leeta McMahon Becomes Bride of Arthur Hind,” Utica Observer-Dispatch, November 26, 1926, 32.

135

an affectionate nickname for the bride “In the Matter of the Trans fer Tax Proceeding in the Estate of Arthur Hind, Deceased,” Surrogate’s Court, Oneida County, New York, February 2, 1934, 18.

135

The couple had been living together Author interview with Rich ard L. Williams, August 14, 2014.

135

the daughter of a harness maker Advertisement for Leonard Gar-danier, Oswego County Gazeteer and Business Directory for 1866–67 (Oswego, New York: The Daily Commercial Advertiser, 1866), 99; “Leonard Gardanier,” Utica Herald-Dispatch, March 28, 1904, 4.

136

One listed her as an attendant 1910 United States Census, Orange County, New York, “Middletown State Psychiatric Hospital,” digital image.

136

“She was the girl” Author interview with Richard L. Williams, August 14, 2014.

136

a second passport application Passport application 593885, digital image, http://www.ancestry.com/.

136

It was the same name she had used SS Cartago, “List of United States Citizens,” arriving at New Orleans, March 12, 1915, digital image, http://www.ancestry.com/.

136

She was Mrs. Hind again Toyo Kisen Kaisha, “Oath to Inward Passenger List,” 1917, digital image, http://www.ancestry.com/.

136

Hind bought her a strand “A Good Philatelist, But No Jewel Buyer, Pearl Sale Indicates,” Utica Observer-Dispatch , August 13, 1947, 3.

137

She registered as Leeta A. Hind in 1918 SS Brazos, “List of United States Citizens,” arriving at San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 20, 1918, digital image, www.ancestry.com/.

137

the SS Brazos, promoted by its owners Advertisement for New York & Porto Rico SS Company, Boston Evening Transcript, November 29, 1912, 15, http://www.ancestry.com/.

137

she boarded the SS Carmania SS Carmania, “List of United States Citizens,” arriving at New York, New York, May 31, 1919, digital image, http://www.ancestry.com/.

137

Hind worked on his stamps The British. Guiana: The World’s Most Famous Stamp (Sotheby’s pre-auction catalogue, 2014), 48.

137

He turned down an offer “Stamp Sale Fails; Price Up $100,000,” New York Times, June 7, 1931, 73.

138

but he did revise his will Last Will and Testament of Arthur Hind, 2.

8. 1940: The Angry Widow, Macy’s, and the Other Plutocrat

140

He raised the price “Stamp Sale Fails; Price Up $100,000,” New York Times, June 7, 1931, 73.

141

”Arthur Hind was sitting in his study” “In the Matter of the Transfer Tax Proceeding in the Estate of Arthur Hind, Deceased,” Surrogate’s Court, Oneida County, New York, February 2, 1934, 1, and testimony of Ann Hind Scala, 10, 16.

142

died on March 1 “Arthur Hind Dies; Noted Philatelist,” New York Times, March 2, 1933, 17.

143

”all prominent Utica men” Charles J. Phillips, “Arthur Hind’s Funeral,” London Philatelist, March 1933, 66.

143

”well-known young Utican” “Suit Over Hind’s Estate Ended; Widow’s Marriage to P.C. Scala Announced,” Utica Observer-Dispatch, May 4, 1934, 20.

144

disappointing a Pemberton ”The World’s Greatest Rarity,” Rarities of the World 1970 (New York: Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, 1970), 23.

144

“had he lived a month longer” Kent B. Stiles, “1856 Issue Keeps Price,” New York Times, August 7, 1938, 140.

145

another stamp dealer, Ernest G. Jarvis “‘Rarest Stamp’ Put on Market at $37,500,” New York Times, September 25, 1938, 58.

145

She had steadily increased “$48,000 Insurance Placed on Stamp,” New York Times, February 15, 1935, 21.

145

“She has none of the reverence” “Woman Owner Not Awed by ‘Terribly Homely’ Penny Stamp Worth $50,000,” Olean [New York] Times-Herald, June 6, 1940, 4.

145

bigger and more “Barnumesque” Robert Hendrickson, The Grand Emporiums (New York: Stein and Day, 1978), 3.

146

“That little black spot” “Penny Stamp Worth $50,000 to Be Displayed at the Stamp Centennial Exhibition, New York World’s Fair,” Elizalde Stamp Journal, April-May-June 1940, 12.

146

When she finally sold it “Rare Stamp, Worth $50,000, Changes Hands in New York,” Boston Globe, August 8, 1940, 3; “World’s Costliest Stamp, Valued at $50,000, Sold,” New York Times, August 8, 1940, 22.

146

only $40,000 “$40,000 for One Stamp,” New York Times, August 11, 1940, 116.

146

she pocketed $45,000 Rarities of the World 1970 (New York: Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, 1970) 23.

146

The judge who handled the case “Mrs. Ann Hind Scala Granted Divorce,” Utica Daily Press, January 16, 1946, 6.

147

Mrs. Hind died “Mrs. Hind Found Dead in Her Home,” Utica Daily Press, June 25, 1945, 2; “Mrs. Ann Hind, Sold Stamp for $50,000,” New York Times, June 23, 1945, 13.

147

The judge turned him down “Court Denies Scala Plea to Set Aside Divorce,” Utica Daily Press, August 27, 1946, 5.

147

Soon after the purchase Kent B. Stiles, “World’s Rarest Stamp, a $50,000 Item, Comes Out of Hiding to Star on Television,” New York Times, October 29, 1949, 17.

148

the new owner recalled “Australian Veteran Identified as Seller of $280,000 Stamp,” New York Times, April 2, 1970, 36.

148

an Australian who had been David Lidman, “British Guiana 1c Owner Identified,” New York Times, April 12, 1970, 150; also “A Short Account of Celanese Corporation of America,” Plastics Distributor and Fabricator, March-April 1999, http://www.plasticsmag.com/ta.asp?aid=1801.

149

”was not a stamp collector.” David Lidman, “British Guiana 1c Owner Identified,” New York Times, April 12, 1970, 150.

150

”after seeing the destruction” William E. Kelly, “Former Local Man Sells Rare Stamp for $280,000,” Cumberland [Maryland] Evening Times, April 2, 1970, 11.

151

He left Macy’s “Private Finbar Kenny,” New York Times, August 2, 1942, 74.

152

one of three inaugural events Christopher Gray, “Streetscapes: The ‘Hybrid Pseudo-Modern’ on Columbus Circle,” New York Times, April 26, 1987, Section 8, 14.

152

”Despair and suspense mounted” Stanley N. Bierman, The Wwld’s Greatest Stamp Collectors, 148.

153

the first person to plead Martin T. Biegelman and Daniel R. Biegel-man, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Compliance Guidebook (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), 15.

153

”a significant number of.America’s major corporations” Quoted in Biegelman and Biegelman, 14.

154

also designing and printing stamps See also Stewart McBride, “The Case of the Airmailed Voter and Other Tales of the Cook Islands,” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1982, 1; “Stamp Firm Stuck in Bribery Case; First Fine Posted Under New Law” (Associated Press), Toledo [Ohio] Blade, August 3, 1979, 25; Philip Taubman, “New York Concern Admits Rigging Pacific Vote to Keep Stamp Rights,” New York Times, August 3, 1979, A10; Mike Koehler, “Postage Stamps, Sir Albert Henry, Flying Voters, and the FCPA,” FCPA Professor (website), http://fcpaprofessor.com/postage-stamps-sir-albert-henry-flying-voters-and-the-fcpa/.

154

”somewhat of a Huey Long’’ Stewart McBride, “The Case of the Airmailed Voter and Other Tales of the Cook Islands,” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 1982, 1.

156

a profit of $90,000 Richard Jewell and Vernon Harbin, The RKO Story (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1982), 156.

156

Bosley Crowthers review Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: The Saint Relaxes,” New York Times, January 31, 1941, 15.

157

On January 18 Author’s transcription of DVD re-release of You Bet Your Life, episode 50-22 and uncredited liner notes (Los Angeles: Shout! Factory, 2004).

157

writers scribbling on an overhead projector Robert Dwan, As Long As They’re Laughing: Groucho Marx and You Bet Your Life (Baltimore: Midnight Marquee Press, 2000), 84.

159

“She did collect stamps” Author interview with Virginia Baxter, January 27, 2015.

159

went on to a long career “Alice Backes Citron” (obituary), Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2007, http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/latimes/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=86973891.

9. 1970: The Wilkes-Barre Eight

160

never went to its owners’ hometown Author interview with Irwin Weinberg, March 19, 2016.

165

”The rules are not working” Quoted in William L. Silber, Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), 74.

166

the economy slipped See, for example, Paul Krugman, “Franklin Delano Obama,” New York Times, November 10, 2008, A29.

166

Weinberg got a glimpse Author interview with Irwin Weinberg, April 8, 2015; also David Gelernter, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (New York: Free Press, 1995).

167

even little Lorin Maazel Allan Kozinn, “Lorin Maazel, an Intense and Enigmatic Conductor, Dies at 84,” New York Times, July 14, 2014, D10.

170

”He [was] bullish ” Viola Ilma, Funk & Wagnalls Guide to the World of Stamp Collecting (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978), 137.

171

He was so confident Weinberg interview, March 19, 2016.

171–72

”Inflation and devaluation are twin specters” Joseph L. Lincoln, “Royalty Under Glass,” Discover magazine, The (Philadelphia) Sunday Bulletin , May 30, 1976, 10.

174

”Unique, the rarest and most valuable stamp” ”The World’s Greatest Rarity,” Rarities of the World 1970 (New York: Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, 1970), 71.

175

Siegel’s wife, Miriam Interview with Robert Rose, June 9, 2015.

176

But it went unmentioned Rarities of the World 1970, 2–4.

176

Small’s identity was revealed David Lidman, “British Guiana 1c Owner Identified,” New York Times, April 12, 1970, D31.

176

The Waldorf was where “MacArthur Plaque Unveiled at Wal dorf Towers, Marks His Residence There for 13 Years to 1964,” New York Times, January 27, 1969, 16; “James A. Farley, 88, Ran Roosevelt Campaigns,” New York Times, June 10, 1976, 1; author interview with Matt Zolbe and Meg Towner of the Waldorf, September 19, 2012.

177

The auction had to be moved David Lidman, “British Guiana 1¢ Brings $280,000,” New York Times, April 5, 1970, 122.

177

In the crowd were notables Tony Hiss, “One Cent,” The New Yorker, April 4, 1970, 34; author interview with Robert Price, April 23, 2015.

179

Andrew Levitt had started Levitt, Andrew, “The United States 1851 One-Cent Blue,” American Stamp Dealers Association, http://americanstampdealer.com/SubMenu%252FOne_Cent_Blue.aspx%253Fid%253D219.

179

Weinberg looked nervous Hiss, The New Yorker, 33; author interview with Joseph L. Lincoln, April 30, 2015.

180

The New York Times wrote that the Weills Lidman, New York Times, April 5, 1970, 122.

180

“A lot of people, including Mr. Weinberg” Hiss, The New Yorker, 34; and author interview with Tony Hiss, February 25, 2015.

181

“A lot of people questioned spending that much” Author interview with Ken Martin, April 30, 2015.

181

A customer “who has a warmth for stamps” Lidman, New York Times, April 5, 1970, 122.

185

The story was picked up “Irwin Weinberg Got Attached to His $500,000 Treasure; Then He Found He Couldn’t Get Loose,” People, July 10, 1978, 43.

186

the game show “To Tell the Truth” Chris Rosenblum, “Businessman Reflects on Brush with World’s Priciest Stamp,” Centre Daily Times (State College, Pa.), June 21, 2014.

10. 1980: “The Man Showed Up”

187

Weinberg cruised Author interview with Irwin Weinberg, April 8, 2015.

187

A stockbroker quoted Robert Metz, “Investors Try, Try Again,” New York Times, January 8, 1979, 61.

187–88

New York magazine echoed “Better Than Blue Chips: Objects to Appreciate,” New York, February 28, 1979, 80.

188

Salomon Brothers H.J. Maidenberg, “Tangible Assets vs. Financial,” New York Times, July 16, 1979, D5.

188

When Stamps magazine Quoted in James E. Lee, “Where Have All the Stamp Shops Gone?” http://www.jameslee.com/news4.htm.

189

Weinberg’s investors Author interviews with Irwin Weinberg, April 8, 2015, and March 19, 2016.

190

”The queen had only twenty cottonreels” Author interview with Victor Krievins, January 20, 2015.

190

Du Pont was thrilled Author interviews with Taras M. Wochok, January 19, 2015, and Robert P. Odenweller, January 17, 2015.

191

The mansion itself Bill Ordine and Ralph Vigoda, Fatal Match: Inside the Mind of Killer Millionaire John du Pont (New York: Avon Books, 1998), 12.

191

after her death Ibid., 120.

192

As du Pont acknowledged Tom Fox, “’Nova Wrestling Coach Du Pont Aims at an NCAA Title,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 27, 1986, A13.

192

Villanova repudiated du Pont Mark Bowden and Clea Benson, “The Prince of Newtown Square,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 4, 1996, 1.

192

“a triumph that was essentially bought” Jere Longman, Pam Bel-luck, and Jon Nordheimer, “A Life in Pieces: For du Pont Heir, Question Was Control,” New York Times, February 4, 1996, 1.

192

He was the model Mark Bowden and Clea Benson, Philadelphia Inquirer, February 4, 1996, 1.

193

Victor Krievins told me Author interview with Victor Krievins, January 20, 2015.

193

He built the Delaware Museum Bill Hewitt, “A Man Possessed,” People, February 12, 1996, 45.

194

he called the “magenta lady” Author interview with Victor Krievins, January 20, 2015.

194

Warwick Paterson Scott Paterson, “Warwick Paterson and the British Guiana 1c Magenta,” Campbell Paterson Newsletter, 2014, 3.

194

He provided the local police Jere Longman, “Desperate Stand in a Dream World,” New York Times, January 28, 1996, 1.

194

He gave one a second job Author interview with Robert P. Odenweller, January 17, 2015.

195

problems like excessive drinking Longman, Belluck, and Nordheimer, New York Times, February 4, 1996, 1.

195

Du Pont took a seat Author interview with Victor Krievins, January 20, 2015.

196

The bidding on the one-cent magenta Carey Winfrey, “World’s Most Valuable Stamp Auctioned for a Record $850,000,” New York Times, April 6, 1980, A1.

196

he sent his son Author interview with Irwin Weinberg, April 8, 2015.

197

”more fiefdom than home” Ordine and Vigoda, Fatal Match, 12.

203

It lay in a safe-deposit box Author interview with Robert P. Odenweller, January 17, 2015.

205

Du Pont filed for divorce Longman, Belluck, and Nordheimer, New York Times, February 4, 1996, 1.

212

Du Pont’s eccentricities worsened Ordine and Vigoda, Fatal Match, 173.

213

Jean could not have been his mother Ibid., 166.

213

people were walking behind the walls Ibid., 165.

213

”a Howard Hughes–typefigure” Ibid., 264.

214

The man behind the counter Author interview with Steve Pendergast, May 7, 2015.

11. 2014: “I Expected to See Magenta, and I Saw Magenta”

218

”I understand you want” Voicemail message to author, May 21, 2015.

219

The house that Dave Schultz Kris Maher, “Du Pont Estate Remade With Luxury Homes,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/dupont-estate-remade-with-luxury-homes-1421342284.

220

number one customer Author interview with Scott R. Trepel, president of Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, April 28, 2015.

221

the mystery owner “A Coin So Rare It Shouldn’t Exist Is Out of the Vault,” New York Times, August 13, 2013, A14.

223

”It took me back” Author interview with Weitzman, May 22, 2015.

225

an operatically complicated plot Summary here is based on Joseph Cowles, “The Fabulous One-Cent Magenta,” http://www.thegoodartist.com/cbfc05.pdf.

227

serial number of the Author interview with Ted Wilson, January 21, 2016

227

”I was told” Author interview with Allen R. Kane, May 27, 2015.

231

“We can capture a giraffe” Quoted in Grace Judd Banker, “Collection of Books of Stamps Is on Display,” Berkeley Daily Gazette, March 29, 1937, 12.

231

”[d]uring the philatelic period” William Styron, The Suicide Run (New York: Random House, 2009), 190.

232

“came to think of himself as cosmopolitan” Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 23.

233

the Subway Stamp Shop hauled away “About Our Company” on Subway Stamp Shop’s website, http://www.subwaystamp.com/Aboutus.asp.

234

“The ranks of hardcore collectors” Daniel Akst, “Selling a One-Cent Stamp for Millions of Dollars,” The New Yorker (online), April 21, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/selling-a-one-cent-stamp-for-millions-of-dollars.

235

“are like holy relics” Philipp Blom, “Collections Are Objects of Desire,” New York Times (online), December 30, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/29/why-we-collect-stuff/collections-are-objects-of-desire.

237

He probably also guessed See, for example, “Marilyn Monroe Marries Joe DiMaggio,” http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/marilyn-monroe-marries-joe-dimaggio.

When it was issued in 1856, it cost a penny. When it was sold at Sotheby’s in 2014, the tiny square of faded red paper known as the one-cent magenta cost nearly $US9.5 million, making it the world’s most valuable object by weight.

Printed in what was then British Guiana, one-cent magentas were provisional stamps intended for local newspapers. Most were later thrown out, but one survived. Discovered by a young boy in 1873, the stamp has since been through the hands of nine fanatical owners including an Australian-born engineer, a convicted murderer, and a fabulously wealthy Frenchman who hid it from view (not even King George V of England could get a peek).

The One-Cent Magenta weaves a fascinating tale of obsession to own the world’s most fragile treasure, and the extraordinary characters who have loved and lost it.