The World’s Most Expensive Stamp: The 1 cent British Magenta
If you’re from Guyana there’s a possibility that you have the world’s most valuable thing in your home. No, I’m not talking about the love of your family. I’m talking a 9.48 million US dollar piece of merchandise stuck somewhere in between a stack of old letters. This is the story of the world’s most famous stamp The British Guiana 1c Magenta.
Today we’re talking about the British Guiana 1c Magenta, a stamp so rare that it is literally the single most expensive item in the world by weight. A stamp so valuable the French took it from Germany as payback for World War I. A stamp so mythical that even Donald Duck went on a journey to the heart of Guyana to find it.
Origins
The story of this stamp begins in April 1856. At the time, stamps for the colony of British Guiana were made by a London based printing company. Most times this system worked. Except this time, the stamps ran out before a fresh shipment could arrive from England. Thinking quickly, the postmaster of British Guiana E.T.E. Dalton commissioned an emergency run from the firm of Joseph Baum and William Dallas, publishers of the Official Gazette in Georgetown. They printed one-cent stamps for newspapers and four-cent stamps for letters. Dalton asked for the design found on the regular stamps. That was the name British Guiana, and the seal of the colony which was a ship, with the Latin motto, "Damus Petimus que Vicissim", (in English "We give and we seek in return").
Dalton took one look at the locally made stamps and it was rejection at first sight. He reportedly hated the design and the poor quality of the paper it was printed on. In fact the quality was so poor the Dalton asked the postal workers to initial each stamp before selling it to prevent forgery. By the time the local batch had run out the anticipated shipment of the original stamps arrived. The stamp soon began to fade into distant memory…
The Journey Begins…
That was until 1873 when Vernon Vaughan a 12-year-old Scottish boy living in Demerara found the stamp while rummaging through his uncle’s personal effects. This specific stamp bore the initials "E.D.W" for Postal Clerk E.D. Wight. It was still attached to a piece of paper, so the boy wet it to loosen the adhesive. However, this obviously damaged the already poor-quality paper. But when the lad finally freed this rare one of a kind stamp from its papery prison he unfortunately made the same mistake many persons do with Guyana, its products, and its people: sell it for a pittance without a full appreciation of its inherent value.
He sold the stamp to local stamp collector for six shillings, so he could buy better looking stamps for his collection. Which is around 1 US dollar in today’s money. However, even its new owner N. R. McKinnon, couldn’t see its value and sold it 5 years later to a man in Scotland. Thus began a 100-year journey that the stamp around the world. However, its rarity was still not revealed until years later when a London stamp dealer assessed it. The Magenta passed through the hands of several prominent stamp collectors. Nevertheless, the first true show of this stamp’s value is arguably the short custody battle that occurred in 1917 following the death of its owner Count Phillippe von Ferrari of Paris.
Magenta’s price just went up
When he died Ferrari bequeathed his massive stamp collection to the Museum for Communication in Berlin. But before the Germans could even say Dankeshon, the French government seized the whole collection, including the 1c Magenta. When he was alive the Count used to just travel the world buying up rare stamps. By his death he had what was considered the world’s best stamp collection, with some of the rarest in the world. Don’t be fooled the French didn’t rob a museum an exhibit for the love of philately. They did it for the money. The whole assortment was auctioned off to pay off German reparations for World War I.
In 1922, wealthy stamp collector Arthur Hind paid a record 352,500 francs for the British Guiana 1c Magenta. But Arthur wasn’t a regular stamp collector. Obviously, he was rich. But he was also obsessed. It is rumored that he was so obsessed with it that he bought and destroyed the only other existing 1c Magenta, just to drive up the value and rarity of his own. Legends aside, his real record-breaking purchase further increased the value and public attention for this rare stamp and by this time, the world was having stamp fever.
Stamp fever grips the world
The public was so captivated by the concept of such a rare piece of postage that even Disney made a whole Donald Duck comic book called The Guilded Man in 1952. Donald Duck takes a trip to the Hinterland for the stamp and eventually run into El Dorado, a man covered in gold dust sounds familiar? (plugs last episode). He eventually obtains the stamp from the king and go home happy.
Back to the stamp, Hinds publicly displayed it in several museums until he died. It then again went through a series of owners until March 1970 when a business syndicate bought the stamp for $280,000. Their aim was to keep rarities such as the British Magenta in America. It was on public display several times over the next decade. Until 1980 when the sold it for $935,000. That buyer was the heir to the DuPont chemical company fortune John E. du Pont. He held on to it until his death in 2010. However, it was locked away in a bank vault for years as duPont was actually committed to a mental facility for the majority of the time he owned the stamp. He was convicted in February 1997 of fatally shooting an Olympic wrestler whom he had sponsored.
Fast forward to 2014, the stamp reached its current owner shoe designer Stuart Weitzman, an avid stamp collector who paid $9.48 million US dollars in a Sotheby’s auction. Unlike duPont, like Weitzman, allowed the public to see this rarity on multiple occasions. The most recently in 2016. And That was the story of the world’s most famous stamp The British Guiana 1c Magenta.
Sources:
1. Carlton, R. Scott. The International Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Philately. Iola WI: Krause Publications, 1997, pp. 36-37. ISBN 0-87341-448-9
2. Williams, L.N. and M., Famous Stamps. London: W & R Chambers Ltd., 1940, p. 26.
3. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/18/world/one-of-a-kind-or-two-of-a-kind-stamp-zealots-want-to-know.html?ref=john_e_du_pont
4. https://oldbid.com/news/coins-stamps/the-one-and-only-british-guiana-1-magenta-part-ii/
5. http://www.guyana.org/features/guyanastory/chapter110.html 6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OapE52ZJeMg
