Fort Lauderdale, Fla. – The red-and-blue mystery stamp with the upside-down biplane made its public debut Monday. It seemed small for its possibly legendary reputation.
Was this the rare Inverted Jenny stamp, one of which sold for $525,000 last year? Did an absentee voter unwittingly mail a Broward County ballot, later disqualified, with one of the most famous stamps on the planet?
Michael DuBasso, director of the nonprofit American Philatelic Foundation, doubted the stamp’s authenticity after studying a photo of it e-mailed by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
The mystery began on Election Day, when the county’s canvassing board sat down to review questionable absentee ballots. One member, former stamp collector John Rodstrom, noticed one stamp amid the other antique ones that made up an absentee ballot’s 87-cent postage: a 24-cent airmail stamp known as the Inverted Jenny.
Neither the ballot nor its envelope included the voter’s name, so officials negated the vote.
Only 100 of the stamps were issued in a single sheet in 1918, depicting a mail plane mistakenly printed upside down. The average Inverted Jenny fetches about $200,000, experts say. A half-dozen are unaccounted for, Dubasso said.
