In a historic auction event, a New York collector, Charles Hack, secured a rare piece of US postal history, the 1918 ‘Inverted Jenny,’ for an unprecedented $2 million. This iconic stamp, featuring a blue inverted Curtiss JN-4 airplane on a red and white backdrop, has earned the moniker “the holy grail of postage.”
The uniqueness of the ‘Inverted Jenny’ lies in its printing error, with the upside-down airplane leading to the cessation of its production, rendering it exceptionally valuable. The Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum notes that only one sheet of 100 inverted center stamps was ever sold. The error occurred during the stamp’s production process, either when an inverted carmine frame sheet was mistakenly fed into the hand press or when the plate printer, after inking and wiping, placed an inverted blue vignette plate into the press.
Charles Hack, a stamp enthusiast who has been collecting since childhood, now possesses not only this extraordinary ‘Inverted Jenny’ but others as well. Notably, he acquired a Jenny in the early 2000s for around $300,000 (£244,329).
The ‘Inverted Jenny’ has permeated popular culture, even making an appearance in the long-running animated TV show The Simpsons. In an episode, Homer Simpson, unaware of its value, dismisses the stamp as “junk” due to the upside-down airplane, discarding it along with other valuable items like the Declaration of Independence and a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius violin.
To commemorate its significance in US mail history, the National Postal Museum produced replicas of the ‘Inverted Jenny’ in 2013. Currently, four original Jennys are showcased in the museum’s William H Gross Stamp Gallery, recognized as the world’s largest stamp gallery.
