The most attentive consumer of the 20th century

Arthur Vidro
On Consumerism
A 24-cent U.S. postage stamp from 1918 changed hands for two million dollars on Nov. 8, making it the most expensive U.S. postage stamp ever.

For that stamp’s existence today, let us credit William T. Robey, who should have gotten an award for Most Attentive Consumer of the 20th Century.

The stamp’s history is rather fascinating.

It was produced to commemorate the introduction of the U.S. Postal Service’s first airmail delivery, from Washington, D.C. to Philadelphia. More than 2 million stamps were to be printed.

The stamp was unusual for its time in that it had two colors, and thus had to be fed through a printing press twice – once for each color application.

Trouble was, the first handful of stamp sheets were inadvertently rotated 180 degrees between the first application of printed color and the second.

Then, as now, professional proofreaders are scoffed upon as being an unnecessary expense, so the mistake was not caught right away.

Postal inspectors soon enough put out an alert for the bungled sheets. They retrieved eight erroneous sheets, and destroyed them, but a ninth slipped through their hands.

Along came a 29-year-old stamp collector name of William T. Robey, who bought a sheet of the new stamps upon their release, May 14, 1918. Because he was an attentive consumer, he looked carefully at the image on the stamps. The airplane was upside down!

Turns out the postal clerk, though he had been told to watch out for the error, hadn’t recognized it, because he had never seen an airplane.

Before Robey left the post office, he pointed out the error and asked for more sheets, but none of them had the error.

By calling attention to the matter, Robey triggered into action the postal inspectors, who began hounding Robey at his job, and his wife at their home, demanding the return of the mistaken stamps.

Partly to get the inspectors off his back, and worried about keeping the potentially valuable stamps under his mattress, he quickly sold them to a stamp dealer (name of Eugene Klein) for $15,000 — which in today’s money would be about $317,000. He spent the $15,000 on a new car and a new house. No loan or mortgage needed. Middle-class Robey now had enough cash to afford the items.

It pays to be an attentive consumer!

Robey had bought the sheet of 100 stamps for $24 (in today’s money about $510), so he turned a fast and handsome profit.

The stamp is known as the “Inverted Jenny” because the depicted upside-down airplane is a Curtiss JN-4 biplane, known as a “Jenny.”

Three weeks ago, the Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries in New York City auctioned off one of those stamps Robey had bought. A three-way bidding war ensued. The hammer price was about $1.7 million, but when the usual buyer’s premium of 18% is added in, the purchase price becomes $2 million.

For a 24-cent postage stamp.

This auctioned stamp is in the best condition of all the surviving stamps from that sheet, for it was protected from light from 1918 to 2018.

The fellow paying $2 million is Charles Hack, a 76-year-old New Yorker.

I hope Hack has good insurance. Regular home insurance does not cover collectible objects, such as fine art and rare books and postage stamps. To insure such valuables, one needs to purchase collectibles insurance.

Now suppose one of your ancestors had bought an inverted Jenny back at the post office in 1914. A single 24-cent stamp. And it had been passed down through the family, informally, until you now possessed it.

And suppose theft or fire meant the disappearance or destruction of the stamp. Without collectibles insurance, would you be covered?

Well, yes, you would, insurance firms are quick to say. For its full value, they might add. But what they really mean is the original purchase value, not the replacement value.

So for that $2 million stamp you had but no longer have, the insurance firm would pay you 24 cents.

Oh, the day after Robey bought the 100 stamps, airmail actually began. The first two flights were failures. The first attempt, the pilot flew the wrong direction (how appropriate, considering the upside-down stamp). The second attempt, the same pilot crashed before arriving.

Only on the third attempt, after a better pilot was given the mission, did it succeed.

Consumers — and pilots — are better off being attentive.