One Cent Magenta Read online

  So, for a few hours on a blustery March day, the Queen’s collection was complete.

  And it is the Queen’s collection. The crown jewels, the artwork, and furnishings in the royal palaces, from the chandeliers to the china, are all owned by a royal charitable trust. The stamp collection is owned personally by the monarch and has been for generations. Prince Charles might well inherit the stamps on his mother’s death, assuming he succeeds her, just as she inherited them from her father, King George VI, who inherited them from his father, King George V. But she could leave the collection to the royal trust or to the British Library.

  The writer David McClure, the author of the first full-1ength book on the royal family’s wealth in twenty years, estimated in 2015 that the philatelic holdings were worth £10 million, or about $14.8 million. But he noted that some estimates put their value as high as £100 million, which would amount to more than a third of the royal net-worth statement.

  The philatelic assets are impressive, whatever they are worth. George V’s stamps are kept in 328 red album, George VI’s in more than a hundred blue boxes. The stamps issued since the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II are in green albums and green boxes.

  One reason for Redden’s visit to the palace was to compare the one-cent magenta with some of the four-cent stamps from British Guiana in the Royal Philatelic Collection. Michael Sefi, the keeper of the Royal Philatelic Collection, told me that he had never seen the actual one-cent until Redden walked in.

  Sefi told me he was surprised to learn, from me, that Redden was an American. Redden’s plummy voice and pleasantly formal manner seemed so British that they did not talk about American sitcoms—Sefi remains partial to Friends, which Redden had never watched—or major league baseball in the United States. Redden is no fan, but Sefi has been devoted to the St. Louis Cardinals since 1987, when the World Series was carried on television in Britain and the Cardinals lost by one game. Sefi told me that clinched “the notorious British affection for the underdog.” He is so passionate about the team that he took time off in the spring of 2016 to fly to St. Louis for a seven-game home stand.

  Redden told me that they spent a few hours comparing it to other stamps “and, I think, satisfying [Sefi’s] own curiosity to look at this stamp.” Sefi said he was surprised that another one-cent magenta had never turned up, just as there has never been a single two-cent rose from 1851. Ten copies of that stamp exist, but all are in pairs on cover. (In Stamp World, “on cover” usually means on an envelope.)

  But studying stamps was not Redden’s only purpose in going to see Sefi. He was making a sales call. Redden is discreet, and Sefi would not discuss their conversation with me either, but Redden did not need to be explicit. Sefi knew that in ninety days, the one-cent magenta would be available. Perhaps Sefi would consider bidding?

  “There’s always something we’d quite like if it would come on the market,” Sefi told me later. “That’s the nature of collecting, isn’t it?” But he had heard the rumors that the Royal Philatelic Collection bid for the one-cent magenta at Redden’s auction, and he tamped them down: “We did not.”

  Redden breezed into the Royal a couple of days later and hit a speed bump.

  The Expert Committee’s command post is down a narrow corridor with old floorboards that creak beneath blue carpeting. Behind an unmarked door is a long, L-shaped room dominated by a conference table that is useful for spreading out pages from stamp albums. Leather-bound albums fill the shelves against the walls: albums for actual stamps from the British Empire, albums for mere photographs of stamps from the British Empire, albums for stamps from the rest of the world, and albums for stamps determined to be forgeries. The Royal keeps the forgeries, just in case a forger is dumb enough to try the same caper twice.

  The Expert Committee is the Supreme Court of stamps: it handles only the most important cases, about three thousand a year, and like the Supreme Court, it keeps no official notes of its deliberations. There the comparisons to jurists in long black robes end. The members of the Expert Committee are unpaid volunteers, which means that they tend to be retired or semi-retired people. The workload is punishing, requiring detailed research before each of the committee’s meetings. Someone with a day job would surely fall behind, and that would be noticed—and whispered about.

  No one really questioned the authenticity of the one-cent magenta as Redden opened his briefcase and laid it on the conference table; its years in du Pont’s safe-deposit box were well documented. For the Expert Committee, the next few hours were about scholarship, and probably bragging rights—“I held the one-cent magenta. With my tweezers, of course.”

  For all its old-fashioned scholarship, the Expert Committee does more than look through magnifying glasses and make educated guesses. It does cutting-edge scientific sleuthing with the same kinds of machinery found in crime labs around the world. The Expert Committee uses the same kinds of devices that customs agencies use to spot doctored passports or birth certificates.

  The company that makes the centerpiece of the Expert Committee’s arsenal, a machine known as a video spectral comparator, says similar instruments have examined disputed lottery tickets, contested wills, and suspicious stock certificates. The technology was perfected in England in the 1970s, and similar machines have put detectives on the trail of counterfeiters who turned out fake driver’s licenses, and medical-malpractice lawyers on the trail of doctors who altered patients’ hospital records. The machines have looked at contested maps of the Middle East where billions in oil revenue was at stake. The FBI, the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security all have the same equipment; many have the same model. The author Patricia Cornwell rented one for her research on Jack the Ripper. And a stamp figured in that. It had been licked by the person who put it on the envelope. Cornwell had the DNA on the stamp tested and found that it belonged to the British painter Walter Sickert, and Cornwell declared him the Ripper. (“Ripperologists” tore apart her findings; she countered that continuing the mystery served them better than did closing the case.)

  This is the height of nondestructive testing: a camera that can zoom in to take images that make the grain of the paper look as jagged as a mountain range, and can be adjusted to examine a stamp with different filters and types of light—everything on the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared. It can, among other things, expose different inks on a single stamp. It can show when a stamp has been rubbed or scuffed.

  And the certificate that the Expert Committee approved said just that—the stamp suffered from “surface rubbing,” wear and tear from being scuffed, pressed against other stamps in albums. This was a particularly British way of saying the face of the stamp was far from pristine. For all anyone knows, it could have been scuffed when it was still on the newspaper wrapper in British Guiana.

  The next sentence was the one that would cause problems for Redden, for it raised the question of whether the one-cent magenta had had some cosmetic work done. It said the “surface rubbing” had been “reduced by overpainting at some time in the past,” meaning that someone had attempted to cover up the blemishes. In its crudest form, “over-painting” would involve mixing some magenta paint and swabbing it on the stamp. Perhaps one of the greatest collectors of all had ordered it done during the not quite forty years he owned it starting in 1878.

  The 2014 committee referred to the problems because it had to reckon with Bacon, who had mentioned a slight disfigurement after seeing the stamp in Paris. “It was described in Bacon as rubbed,” Christopher G. Harman, the chairman of the Expert Committee and a past president of the Royal, told me the first time I met him. “It’s part of the history of the stamp,” and he did not care if spelling out that history complicated things for Redden. “We don’t always have one-hundred-percent satisfied customers,” he declared when I interviewed him a second time. “We are after the truth. We are trying to give a true evaluation of an item, which will include observations. Something that’s one hundred fifty years old is
not going to be pristine.”

  The committee knew it had been rubbed when Bacon inspected it. The committee also knew it did not appear rubbed when Redden brought it in. “It’s perfectly logical,” Harman explained. “Most of these stamps had the surface rubbed and then touched up. We accept the fact that this was enhanced by painting.”

  The mention of the rubbing would leave some American collectors scratching their heads and saying that since the committee could not establish who had done it or when or why, the committee need not have mentioned it. But that bit of cosmetic work, if that is what it was, was not Harman’s only concern. “The color in the center is unnatural, and if you look at the front, there is no white showing.” This might or might not have been a liability: “Many of these get painted on the front. It was perfectly acceptable in those days. Today, you’d get scolded.”

  Harman had seen the stamp twice before, in 1965 when it was shown in London and in 1986 when it was shown in Australia—but only the front was shown then. He told me that the real surprise in 2014 was what was on the back—the large wheel-like star symbol on the back of the stamp. “We’d never seen one before,” he said.

  That was a footnote that did not deter the committee from reaching its verdict. Nor did the committee delay because the documentation was incomplete. Improbable as it sounds, Harman told me that the Royal’s copy of the 1935 certificate was nowhere to be found. “I know I’ve seen it,” he told me. “I remember seeing it.” But the folder containing it was missing.

  No matter. The new certificate was quickly written out by Peter Lister, a retired chemistry teacher. He had filled out dozens of certificates in his years on the Expert Committee, but No. 217,796 was different. He felt a sudden sense of wonderment and pride. It was his signature that the public would see, his signature that would figure in the continuing history of one of the icons of philately. His hand shook from the first letter to the last.

  “Here’s our patient, as they called it in London,” Redden announced brightly after shaking hands with another world-class expert, this one at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Postal Museum, next door to Union Station in Washington. The patient was the one-cent magenta, looking tiny and fragile on a velvet bed. The expert was the museum’s research scientist, a philatelist named Thomas M. Lera, who had agreed to put the stamp through its paces so the data about the one-cent magenta would be available to stamp collectors.

  Redden and I were taking an early-morning train from New York with a security guard in tow. I met Redden at Pennsylvania Station, and I asked—quietly—where the stamp was. He half-whispered that, as always, it was in his briefcase, which he set in the luggage compartment over his head. Between Philadelphia and Baltimore, I asked him to take it down. I had been flirting with photography— like philately, another addictive hobby—and I had brought along a new camera that I wanted to try out. I watched the guard squirm as Redden moved the briefcase to the seat opposite his. A moment later, Redden lifted it onto his lap and hunched over it as the miles rolled by outside the window.

  In New Jersey, someone else with an interest in the one-cent magenta boarded the train: Robert P. Odenweller, a philatelist so highly regarded that he was invited to serve on the Royal’s governing body even though he is an American. Odenweller wears many hats in Stamp World. He is also a member of the postal museum’s Council of Philatelists, and du Pont’s estate had hired him as an adviser—he had been a friend of du Pont’s. In his advisory role, he was firm about one point: nothing could undercut the Royal’s findings. Minutes after settling in next to Redden, he was telling me that the postal museum can do tests, but unlike the Royal, the postal museum does not render expert opinions. As it happened, that was the first thing Lera said after leading the way to his airy workroom, which had more devices than the Expert Committee’s room at the Royal. “More toys,” someone joked as Redden opened his briefcase and took out the stamp.

  Redden, of course, had more in mind than just collecting data. He wanted to generate buzz about the auction. He already knew, from conversations with postal museum officials, that they would not bid on the stamp. But they had offered to display the stamp if the buyer would agree to a long-term loan.

  First on the agenda was a procedure that would involve sliding the patient into a video spectral comparator like the one at the Royal. Lera also wanted to run some X-ray scans. These are not like hospital X-rays of broken bones; they do not yield images that a layman with a displaced wrist fracture can make sense of. Instead, they provide data points that a computer can assemble in a graph.

  But Redden, worried about possible damage to the stamp, was not sure that he would let Lera put all the tools to use. Redden all but body-blocked Lera when Lera showed him a micrometer that could measure the thickness of the stamp. It had a lever and looked as if it would clamp down on the stamp like an embossing device. Redden worried that it would leave an impression, an indentation, on the surface of the stamp. He called the micrometer “the torture instrument.”

  An infrared spectrometer also gave Redden pause, because it, too, had a lever that snapped down like a clamp. Redden saw the spectrometer as the Stamp World equivalent of a horror-movie hammerhead. It could ruin the stamp in a single chomp. For the rest of the day, the theme from Jaws played in my head.

  “Doesn’t even put a dent in it,” Lera said, as he flipped the lever on notebook paper.

  “I hope not,” Redden said, unconvinced. The Jaws music in my head got louder.

  What followed was a physics lesson that turned into a rebuttal to the Royal on the abrasion issue—the “rubbing” that Sir Edward had noted and the Expert Committee had mentioned on the certificate—and the coloring problem on the back that had troubled Harman.

  Lera, writing in a scientific journal, once described his work as “exciting electrons in the atoms. These atoms then emit photons.” The photons can be charted, and from that data, someone like Lera can assemble a biography of a stamp different from the usual description in words.

  Lera began by demonstrating what his machines could do. He slid in a pair of one-penny stamps from Mauritius into the spectral comparator. As Redden and I looked over his shoulder, with Odenweller a few feet away, Lera said that the two stamps were about the same age as the one-cent magenta, but far less valuable. And something was wrong with the postmark on one. The machine showed the postmark contained two colors of ink. The line of the circle had been altered. “I’m pretty sure it was done with a Sharpie,” he said with a chuckle.

  Lera had promised that his examination of the stamp would be noninvasive, and the stamp was all but untouched. Even so, I was still hearing the Jaws music as Lera looked at the brightly colored lines in a graph on a computer monitor and announced, “It’s the original ink.” He changed some settings as he showed us the postmark. Redden declared happily, “That’s the first time I’ve seen the 1856 so clearly delineated.”

  The readings showed that the pigment that gave the paper its magenta color was identical all the way through. No one could have created an exact match to the pigment later on. It was this finding that put Lera at odds with the Royal and its notion of over-painting. Lera would have detected a color wash, a dye job to bring back the original color and rid the stamp of its tired, rubbed appearance.

  Redden understood the implications: the entire sheet must have been painted before it went through the printing press. Whatever scuffing or rubbing that Bacon remembered from his look at the stamp in 1891 was nothing more than normal wear and tear.

  So Washington was at odds with London over a small point. But Stamp World lives for small points. What was important, what mattered to the world beyond Stamp World, was that there were no doubts on either side of the Atlantic about the authenticity of the one-cent magenta.

  Redden, elated, could go home to New York with only one item left on his to-do list: sell the stamp.

  As an auctioneer, Redden does not babble into the microphone at dizzying speeds. Nor does he induce reluc
tant bidders to put up their paddles by glaring at them. He is not one for cajoling or browbeating, at least not in public. He is traveling the road paved by Peter Cecil Wilson, who was Sotheby’s top executive from 1958 to 1979. “The cunning of Wilson,” a colleague once said, “is that there is no cunning.”

  It was Wilson who introduced the marketing and hype that became everyday tools in Redden’s trade but were unknown in the 1950s. Wilson turned a sale of post-Impressionist paintings into a black-tie evening, with A-list celebrity guests like Lady Churchill, Somerset Maugham, Margot Fonteyn, and Kirk Douglas.

  But the post-Impressionist auction was more than a party; it was the beginning of a transformation. Auction houses had been, in effect, wholesalers—middlemen— selling to dealers. Under Wilson, Sotheby’s became a retailer tantalizing, and selling directly to, collectors. Out went the quiet certainty of the private sale; in came the hubbub of the sales room, and with it a certain theatricality. Some art-world historians even credit Wilson with making auction houses the force that supplanted museum curators and cloistered scholars as arbiters of taste. Wilson—and, eventually, Redden—could not resist the ever-rising spiral of “record price” auctions.

  It was the day of the sale, and about two hundred people, by one bartender’s estimate, were mingling at a cocktail party in a large, bright space outside the auction room. It was far fewer than at the 1970 sale, when the turnout was about six hundred, or the 1980 sale, when du Pont was one in a thousand.

  Finally the doors parted, and the crowd moved into the auction room. Redden was wearing a microphone like a television personality, and the room had the layout and trappings of a television studio—the antiseptic chill of the air, the wide stage area, the shopworn lectern that would look just fine on camera. A giant video screen dominated the high-ceilinged space, and a row of cameras had been set up in the back. They had unobstructed views of the stamp, up front in a clear plastic column. One middle-aged man in the room said the column reminded him of one he had seen at a birthday party for a hip-hop mogul, except that there had been an almost-naked woman dancing inside the column at the party.