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b"With James Barron, New York Times reporter and author of\\xa0The One-Cent Magenta: Inside the Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World
The One-Cent Magenta: Where It All Began
Veteran New York Times columnist and author James Barron has published a book entitled The One-Cent Magenta: Inside the Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World. The story about how a rather plain magenta stamp issued in the 1850s came to be sold in 2014 for $9.5 million dollars is surprisingly entertaining in its twists and turns and edifying in its illumination of the obsession with rarity and its acquisition within the universe of serious and rich collectors. Barron describes how he first heard of the the One-Cent Magenta at a cocktail party where he bumped into an auctioneer he knew. He had written earlier stories of other famous sales of rare items that this auctioneer had made, e.g., copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta and one of the pianos from the movie Casablanca. This auctioneer mentioned that he hoped to sell the stamp for $10 million but was worried that a group of collectors in London might destroy the stamp by trying to ascertain its authenticity using a benzene solution. At this point, Barron was already convinced that there was a great story to tell. (The benzene tangent, by the way, turned out to be a red herring. Stamps these days are authenticated through some expensive forensic gadgetry.)
The story begins in British Guiana in the 1850s when a local postmaster found himself out of stamps and had to go to the town newspaper to print off a quick batch of stamps so that the postal system could carry on. Several hundred one-cent stamps and a lesser number of four centers were printed. The one-cent stamps were immediately used to send out newspapers, presumably to subscribers outside the range of the paper's army of paperboys. The stamps were immediately forgotten about until 16 years later, when a 12-year-old stamp collector in the throes of adolescent philately found a stash of stamped letters in his deceased uncle's home. There was one rather homely and smudged stamp on a newspaper that was not interesting enough to keep him from trading it for other stamps from London. As Barron puts it, this was the worst stamp deal ever. What would become the holy grail of stamp collecting, the One-Cent Magenta, a dream to countless future philatelists, was pawned off for a few shilling\\u2019s worth of ephemera.
Once There Were Two
After a brief digression on extremely rare and expensive American coins and stamps such as the Inverted Jenny, we pick up the story again with a wealthy collector named Arthur Hine who acquired the One-Cent Magenta at some point in the 1920s. He had spent around a million dollars (a fantastic sum in pre-depression dollars) building his stamp collection. Another collector contacted him claiming to have another One-Cent Magenta stamp and offering Hine the opportunity to buy this only copy in existence. As the story goes, Hine invited this seller to his home, where they examined the two stamps side-by-side. Even though there were slight differences\\u2014mainly in the size of the initials written on the face of the stamp\\u2014Hine was sufficiently convinced that he agreed to buy this other One-Cent Magenta. While the two men were about to enjoy post-sale celebratory cigars, Hine set the stamp he'd just bought on fire. He now had the only One-Cent Magenta in the known world. While Hine may have merely thought \\xa0he was preserving the value of his only-one-in-the-world stamp by burning the other, his action might represent the psychological pinnacle of the search for uniqueness. There's little doubt that decades later, the singularity of Hine's One-Cent Magenta did cont..."