One Cent Magenta Read online

  “This is like a horse race—it will be over in four minutes, just like Belmont,” Redden had told me earlier. But actually, it was over in two, about as long as the first couple of commercials on Jeopardy!, which in New York was being broadcast at about the same time. But sitting in the plush studio-audience seats at Jeopardy! would have been more comfortable. The audience at Sotheby’s ended up squeezing into chairs with shiny metal frames and hard-plastic seats that had been jammed as close together as possible.

  No one said, “All right, Mr. Redden, the stamp is ready for its close-up.” No one had to. Its moment had come, and he knew it. He pulled on too-tight cotton gloves— “We wouldn’t want to leave any fingerprints, now would we?” he said as he opened the back of the column. The stamp itself was in no danger of being touched. It was lying in its little see-through carrier, face up, the same position as when it had gone on display on its pre-auction tour. Newspaper and wire-service photographers rushed forward. For a moment the buzz of the audience was drowned out by a metallic beating of wings, the sound of all those shutters flapping—the sound some of the same cameras have made when this or that celebrity was on a red carpet or this or that disgraced public official finally resigned. It was a frenzy, and watching it, Frank J. Buono, a stamp dealer from Binghamton, New York, told me, “I don’t think they’d get that coverage for a van Gogh.”

  Just out of camera range is a long desk occupied by young assistants, each with a telephone or a computer. Those with the telephones tell unseen bidders how the auction is going and get Redden’s eye when the person on the phone wants to get in on the action. This lets buyers acquire their treasures without having to interrupt their schedules to attend auctions in person. David M. Rubenstein, the hedge- fund manager who bought the Bay Psalm Book, called in from Australia. But bidders can also use telephone bidding to remain anonymous. The assistants who place their bids do not identify them by name, only by the number they were assigned when they registered to bid. Unless hackers strike, their secrets are safe with Sotheby’s.

  Before he opened the bidding, Redden plodded through the preliminaries, a kind of throat-clearing that quieted the crowd and satisfied Sotheby’s lawyers, who wanted the fine-print dicta in the back of the auction catalogue read aloud, just in case the winning bidder was such a newbie that he was unaware that “on the fall of the auctioneer’s hammer, the winning bidder will immediately pay the purchase price or such part as we may require.” It’s the same kind of uninspiring wording that the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter once observed in a different context was “as joyless to read as it must have been to write.” Redden also read the Royal’s certificate, including the line about over-painting.

  Sotheby’s had prequalified the bidders, requiring them to hand over certified checks before they got their paddles. So, in the standing-room-only crowd, Redden was really playing to only a few, and he knew exactly who they were.

  Not all of them were in the hard chairs facing the lectern. Sotheby’s has what Redden called “skyboxes”— suites for preferred customers that ring the room. They are not as lavish as the skyboxes at the Super Bowl, which can go for $400,000 and up. Cream-colored curtains guard the plate-glass windows. Some bidders pull them wide open; some leave them closed. Sometimes faces peek through a slit, like a nervous performer before a talent show. Once the bidding begins, they do not hold paddles up to the glass. They communicate with the young assistants on the telephones.

  Downstairs on the floor, heads turned to see who had the paddles, and the deep pockets, to buy the one-cent magenta. Many in the crowd, maybe most, are Stamp World types who do not plan to bid. For them, the auction is like a horse race. They are nothing more than eager spectators. They want to be able to say they were there when the one-cent magenta was sold. They just want bragging rights: I was there. That was what Buono told me as I took the seat next to him. Buono did not register. No paddle for him.

  Redden, determined to set a record, opened the bidding at $4.5 million.

  THREE

  One Cent

  1856: Printed, Sold, and Forgotten

  Some stamps begin with tantalizing stories. A governor’s impatient wife mails the invitations to her fancy-dress ball, and the stamps on the envelopes— the handful that are not thrown away the morning after— become rarities: the Post Office Mauritius stamps. Or a pressman makes a mistake, and the biplanes are printed upside down—one hundred stamps bought at the post office for $24 and soon sold to a collector for fifteen thousand: the Inverted Jenny stamps.

  The one-cent magenta’s appeal came not from being an error but from being overlooked and forgotten. This was also pretty much the story of the place it came from, a place on the right shoulder of South America. Like China and India, Guiana was one of the places Columbus missed on the way to wherever it was that he actually went. It was a backwater before there were backwaters. Later it was picked off by one European monarch after another.

  But first it was El Dorado. Lesser explorers like Amerigo Vespucci in 1499, followed by Vicente Yanez Pinzon in 1500, sailed away repeating the stories that transformed Guiana into a destination. But since none of them had actually found any treasure, it was nothing more than hearsay, really: an unconquered paradise deep in the jungle, a place with endless gold, silver, and jewels, as well as mermaids and headless men. Spain promptly claimed the wild coast, as did Portugal. Neither sent settlers to hack away at the jungle and establish colonies, though, and in Europe, the monarchs feuded. They didn’t take the law into their own hands—they went to an unusually high court, the Vatican. A series of papal bulls fixed a line of demarcation that gave Brazil to Portugal and made Guiana a no-man’s-land.

  Somewhat later in the parade of frustrated explorers came Sir Walter Raleigh, who wanted the political riches as much as the gold. He wrote a best-selling account with a tell-all title: The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) and the Provinces of Emeria, Arromaia, Amapaia and other Countries, with their rivers adjoining. The text —at thirty-four thousand words a fraction of the length of, say, Lewis and Clark’s journals—was as exaggerated as a tourist-office brochure. Guiana “hath more quantity of gold, by manifold, than the best parts of the Indies, or Peru,” Raleigh postulated, adding that all corners of Guiana “appear marvellous rich.” His little rhapsody was so tantalizing that the Pilgrims weighed pointing the May-flower toward Guiana. Apparently they gave more weight to the inconvenient truth that Raleigh had failed to find gold in South America. (Back in London after a huge but fruitless expedition to Guiana, Raleigh was executed because an earlier death sentence had never been lifted.)

  Next came the Dutch, who saw the possibilities of a tropical Holland in what they called Novo Zeelandia. They chartered a trading company and established three colonies, but like Raleigh, they overstated things. Pamphlets aimed at would-be settlers described the fortunes to be made in Novo Zeelandia and stated that “there were many advantages in Guiana as compared with the New Netherlands [New York].”

  Guiana went through several turnovers—first Britain invaded the three Dutch colonies, then the French ousted the British and returned the colonies to Dutch control. Finally the British seized them again in the Napoleonic Wars and began making British Guiana distinctly British. But the British never fully rinsed out the tastes of the past. Well into the twentieth century, the central district of the capital was known by the original Dutch name, Stabroek. In contrast to Barbados, which became known as “Little England,” British Guiana never really satisfied the British. “The museum is somewhat superior to those in other British colonies in the region, but there is no decent library,” sniffed the historian W. Adolphe Roberts, who wrote extensively on the Caribbean colonies.

  Far more famous visitors stopped by. Evelyn Waugh was welcomed like a celebrity, although he denied that competing reporters from local newspapers had trailed him because he was well k
nown: “All first-class passengers are given column interviews on arrival at Georgetown.” But few are grilled the way Waugh was. One of the reporters in the capital city pulled out a clipping of a newspaper article in which Waugh had declared— facetiously, he now insisted—that “the beetles in Guiana were as big as pigeons, and that one killed them with shotguns.” The reporters warned that if he had come to take aim at the beetles, he would be disappointed.

  They asked what he knew about Guiana’s natural resources. “This was their stock, foolproof question,” he said, “because most visitors to Georgetown came there with some idea of prospecting for diamonds or gold”—El Dorado, first and always. But Waugh was no prospector. His itinerary called for him to sail into Brazil and find the Amazon. The disappointed reporters put their notebooks in their pockets and went off to write their stories, leaving Waugh “to tackle the old problem of getting through the afternoon, which, next to the problem of getting through the morning, is one of the hardest a lonely man can set himself.” He went for a walk. He, too, visited the museum— it “took some finding”—and he, too, complained about it, from its musty smell and faded photographs to its collection of “the worst stuffed animals I have seen anywhere.”

  Anthony Trollope had gone to Guiana for his day job as a postal inspector, which was separate from his sideline as a writer. He had already “[raced] about England and Ireland doing official (and officious) work for the Post Office … extending rural service [and] installing letter boxes (which he invented).” He had walked backward through the General Post Office in London, even on the staircases, as he led a tour for a queen—“I think Saxony,” he wrote in his autobiography. The barons with her tipped him half a crown for his effort. “That,” he wrote with understandable understatement, “was a bad moment.”

  If this “incarnate gale of wind” had blustered into British Guiana sooner, we might know more about how the one-cent magenta came into being, for surely he would have written thousands of words about the cooperation between the local post office and the local newspaper. But he did not arrive until 1860, four years after the one-cent magenta had been printed, sold, and forgotten.

  Trollope liked British Guiana. “There never was a land so ill spoken of—and never one that deserved it so little,” he wrote, calling it “the transatlantic Eden.” He pronounced British Guiana well run, with “no noisy sessions of Parliament as in Jamaica [and] no money squabbles as in Barbados.” Trollope reported that the government posted a surplus and that trade was thriving. His hotel was the best in town, but he complained about holes in the curtains, “the mosquitoes having driven me to very madness.” They were a problem on the road, too. Trollope rode in a horse-drawn mail carriage with five paying passengers. It took the bumps hard. An axle snapped, and they had to wait for a couple of hours “among the mosquitoes! … Ugh! Ugh!”

  Mail coaches—and mail itself—had helped bind Britain together. But using the mail as a unifying force proved difficult in British Guiana, where roads had yet to reach into the jungle. The real roads were the rivers, and the boats that navigated them were not dependable. Without land routes, few settlements sprang up. And to have a postal system, you need destinations, places where the mail can be delivered.

  Now for the part that’s inevitable in a book about a stamp, the part that another book about another stamp described as “philatelic facts, which are usually dry.” But nothing like a good martini.

  In 1840, there was a notable development for British Guiana steamships: picked up mail for the first time. The little colony was now connected to London by the newest and fastest means.

  Of course, nothing was terribly new or British about mail. The Dutch West India Company had set up a mail system in 1796. Smallish sailing vessels made the rounds, using a hub-and-spoke system centered on Barbados. It was the same kind of arrangement that airlines would adopt later: to get to Omaha or Abilene, you have to go through Chicago or Dallas. But the Dutch mail was plagued by dishonest captains, and slow voyages made delivery less than reliable.

  The changing casts in government in Guiana— Dutch, British, French, and British again—did not help. The postmasters installed with each takeover came and went with their superiors without improving mail service. In 1820 the postmaster was found to have “let out the Office … to different persons” for fourteen of the sixteen years since he was appointed. Even in the early years of British rule, the postal system was a low priority, and corruption sometimes lurked behind the post office counter.

  By 1856, when the one-cent magenta was commissioned and printed, there was more for the postmaster in British Guiana to worry about than just running out of stamps from London. Past accounts of the one-cent magenta have overlooked racial tensions that had been simmering for years—tensions that would have raised the anxiety level of anyone who ran a business that dealt with the public, especially one that reached across the different elements of a frazzled colony. A race riot erupted early that year, but there was nothing new about racial unrest in British Guiana. In 1847, a Portuguese man had assaulted and injured a black laborer. Black residents “felt exploited by the Portuguese, who controlled the retail shops,” the scholar George K. Danns has written, and when a rumor spread that the black man had died, a mob formed and looted Portuguese-owned shops.

  In late 1855, a street-corner preacher returned home to British Guiana after leading anti-Catholic disturbances in England, Scotland, and Ireland. John Sayers Orr brought his trumpet—his nickname was “Angel Gabriel,” and as always, he blew on the horn to draw attention as he traipsed through the streets of Georgetown. “Nobody expected any trouble,” the historian V.O. Chan wrote in 1970, adding that as far as Orr was concerned, “sensible people probably thought he was an amusing and harmless crackpot.”

  But he rekindled black anger at the largely Catholic Portuguese, whom the white British ruling class also resented. In fact, the authorities tacitly encouraged black residents to attack Portuguese businesses. The police response was slow, perhaps deliberately so. Eventually, though, Orr was jailed in a government crackdown. That set off what the governor called “open insurrection,” and soon the black rioters overpowered the police. Troops from the West Indies had to be called in.

  The post office in Georgetown was apparently untouched. But the turmoil must have concerned the postmaster, Edward Thomas Evans Dalton. Short on inventory in early 1856, he might even have worried that shipments of stamps from Britain would not survive the shortest leg of the journey, from the dock in Georgetown to his post office. Whoever was supposed to carry them could be ambushed by an angry crowd. If that happened, the stamps themselves could be burned, or dumped in the Atlantic. So, as he had in past years when he was running low on stamps and shipments from London did not arrive on schedule, Dalton went to the Royal Gazette for “provisionals”—stamps printed locally. The little newspaper in Georgetown had a printing press—not as large or as fancy as the ones in London, and not equipped the way presses in Britain were. The machine at the Royal Gazette could not handle engravings, but even if it could have, no one in British Guiana could have produced an engraving fast enough.

  The Royal Gazette prepared the provisionals the only way it could, by hand setting type, letter by letter. A printer reached into a type case, no doubt divided into little sections for each letter and number. At least this time the Gazette spelled all the words right. In 1853, when the Gazette printed a batch of one- and four-cent provisional for Dalton, the word “Petimus” (“We give and ask in return”) had been misspelled as “Patimus” (“We suffer in return”).

  “Patimus” probably expressed Dalton’s feelings better. Dalton lasted thirty-seven years as postmaster despite tussles with his Colonial Office bosses in London. Time after time they suspended him, only to reinstate him, and for the most part he managed to sidestep inquiries about perpetual deficits and irregularities. The questioning from London must have been humiliating. Dalton came from a well-connected family that established a dynasty i
n the post office, ending the rapid turnover of the early years under the British. Dalton’s father had been the postmaster before him, after giving up on a career as a sugar planter, and Dalton’s son took over as the postmaster after him.

  The Gazette, though privately owned, was as much a part of the official fabric of British Guiana as the post office, and it had learned the hard way to be careful about what it published in its bland-looking pages. Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, later the editor of the Boston Post, had worked as a printer at the Gazette in the 1830s. In a memoir, he described a morning when Georgetown was rocked by a salute from an artillery detachment in the harbor, followed by an announcement: “The King is dead.” A sailing vessel had arrived with news of the death of King William IV. “The papers brought by the ship gave all the details,” Shillaber wrote, but when the Gazette published the news that afternoon, the Colonial Secretary stormed into the Gazette’s office, demanding to know why the Gazette had not waited for orders. “The King was not yet dead, officially, and such elaborate demonstration of grief, under the circumstances, was not called for.” The official announcement arrived a week or so later, and when it did, the Gazette treated it as if it were new news.

  Shillaber liked one of the Gazette's owners, William Dallas—“a more perfect gentleman and a better printer I had never met with.” Shillaber’s only mention of the other owner, Joseph Baum, had to do with Baum’s wife, a fellow passenger on the ship that had carried Shillaber from New England to British Guiana. She got him talking about print shops he had worked in—and used the information to get her husband some help in the composing room, because skilled labor did not arrive every day.