NEW YORK — One of the longest mysteries in the stamp-collecting world is getting a new chapter.
Six decades after four of the U.S. Postal Service’s most celebrated misprints were stolen from a collectors’ convention, one of the missing “inverted Jenny” stamps surfaced this month at a New York auction house. The 1918 stamps, featuring an airplane printed upside-down, are among the world’s most famous pieces of postage.
“It’s one of the most notorious crimes in philatelic history, and there’s a piece of the puzzle now that’s in place,” said Scott English, the administrator of the American Philatelic Research Library, which owns the stamp.
It was submitted to auctioneer Spink USA by a man from the United Kingdom who had inherited it from his grandfather and said he didn’t know much about it, said George Eveleth, head of the Spink USA philatelic department. Authenticators determined it was not only a genuine Jenny — one of only 100 ever sold — but also one of the four from the 1955 heist. The Associated Press
