About the Inverted Jenny Stamp

 

A bit of history

The Inverted Jenny is a 24 cent United States stamp first issued on May 10, 1918.

The world's first regularly scheduled mail service using airplanes was inaugurated in the United States on Wednesday, 15 May 1918.

The flights on this day marked the first attempt to fly civilian mail using winged aircraft on a regular schedule, which distinguishes this service from earlier official airmail carried on balloons or on airplanes used for short-term or restricted flights.

The first aviator to carry mail as a USPOD-appointed carrier was Earle L. Ovington. His first official flight took place on 23 September 1911, the opening day of an international aviation meet held on Long Island by the Nassau Aviation Corporation.

It is particularly valuable, because of an error: it depicts the image of the Curtiss JN-4 airplane in the center of the design but the airplane is printed upside-down. 

It is the most famous error in American philately. Only one pane of 100 of the invert stamps was ever found, making this error one of the most prized in all philately. 

 How much do they actually cost?

Inverted Jennies are not the most expensive stamps in the world, but Jennies can be pricey. No. 58 sold for $1.35 million in May 2016, according to the Siegel website. Three that had small flaws have changed hands since then, for far less money: No. 79 for $299,000 and No. 28 for $389,000, both in February of last year, and No. 76 for $295,000 last May.

No. 76 was stolen at a stamp show in Norfolk, Va., in 1955. It had been one in a block of four that belonged to the daughter of one of the founders of Dow Jones & Company. Who made off with the block, and who separated them into single stamps, remains a mystery. No one has ever been arrested. Of the four, only one, No. 66, remains missing.

The famous airplaine stamp story began when no one at a government printing plant in Washington noticed the problem with the planes appearing upside down on a single sheet of 100 stamps among thousands printed in May 1918. But a financial clerk named William T. Robey noticed when he went to a Washington post office during his lunch hour soon after the biplane stamps became available. The clerk handed him the sheet of Inverted Jennies.

He paid $24, the face value of the 100 stamps. He left the post office as fast as he could and rebuffed postal inspectors who came looking for him.

He soon turned a profit of $14,976, selling the sheet of 100 stamps for $15,000, enough to buy a new car, which he drove through the back wall of the garage that came with a new house. Or so the story goes...  

After so long, on September 6, 2018, The New York Times reported that the Philatelic Foundation had authenticated an inverted Jenny stamp that had not been seen since the original sheet of 100 was divided in 1918. 

It is a sixth never-hinged copy, the long-missing Jenny at position No. 49 (!). 

On 15 November 2018, the stamp was auctioned by Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries for the then-record sum of US$1,593,000.

For more information, there is a "Society of Inverted Jenny Owners".