One Cent Magenta Read online

  Most letter-writers had depended on pre-stamped stationery, and Hill did not expect “government sticking plasters” on “little bags called envelopes” to eclipse all-in-one letters. Too inconvenient. Too much of a do-it-yourself project. Too foreign to the habits of Englishmen, as one of Hill’s opponents put it. And, for the Post Office, too problematic. Envelopes in all shapes and sizes would make sorting the mail more difficult. Different thicknesses of paper could add weight, burdening anyone and anything carrying mailbags, from long-distance stagecoaches to village postmen.

  But stamps caught on because the pre-stamped stationery introduced with Hill’s rate change was a fiasco. The Post Office had commissioned the well-known artist William Mulready to design the one-piece cover. As the historian F. George Kay, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, later explained it, Mulready’s design “was supposed to be ‘highly poetic,’ but was in fact in execrable taste.” It was also laughable, because Mulready’s seven winged messengers had a total of only thirteen legs. Britain had a good chuckle, the Post Office discarded and destroyed the unsold Mulready covers, and the public turned to the “sticking plasters.” The first was an endearing, enduring hit, the template for British stamps ever since. It was the stylized silhouette of Queen Victoria, the Penny Black.

  Hill’s fingerprints were all over it, because he roughed out the design himself—he was a painter, after all—based on a medal of Queen Victoria, then only two years into her reign. She loved it, and George Kay, who was so scathing about the Mulready cover, could only rave. “The lovely portrait of the eighteen-year-old queen, the bold lettering, the simple background and the aesthetically satisfying border design have never been improved in all the tens of thousands of British and foreign successors since—the vast majority of which are, of course, imitations of this first stamp.”

  One of those imitations was the one-cent magenta. It shared the Penny Black’s simplicity, even if it showed a sailing vessel, not the queen. When it was printed, Victoria had been on the throne for nineteen years, less than a third of her reign.

  By then, or by the 1870s, when young Louis Vernon Vaughan was building his collection in British Guiana, stamps were novel and cool and—believe it or not—high-tech. Stamps had to be printed and perforated and gummed. It took machinery to do all that when machinery was new and intricate and intriguing, and in a backward crown colony like British Guiana where such machinery was slow to arrive, accounts of the way stamps were made in far-off London must have been almost as fascinating as the stamps themselves. Stamps—real stamps, not improvised substitutes like the one-cent magenta— were mass-produced on the latest steam-powered presses, shiny machines that people way off in British Guiana could only dream about. Boys like Vaughan—as well as plenty of adults—were captivated.

  And so philately was born. But it always comes back to that word. There are those who maintain that “philately” is the wrong word for what philatelists do. For that they have one of their own to blame. Celebrated as the world’s first stamp collector by some who have followed in his tracks—or perhaps as the founder of the first club for stamp collectors, a group that lasted only a few months—Georges Herpin was one of stamp collecting’s early elite, a regular in the Parisian salons where stamps were being talked about and the shops where they were being traded. He complained in the mid-1860s that stamp collecting was becoming known as timbrologie, or “timbrology” in English; stamps in French are timbres.

  He wanted a word that would convey the culture change that had come with the widespread introduction of postage stamps in Europe and the United States in the 1840s and ’50s. Herpin sought a word that would denote the monumental shift that stamps had brought on with the idea that once a letter-writer had purchased a stamp and affixed it, the letter would go through, period. No one would demand any more money.

  Herpin reached to ancient Greek and concocted the word philatélie—in English, “philately,” from “philo,” denoting “loving” or “affinity for,” and “ateleia,” meaning, as he put it, “free of all charges of duties [when] affixed” to an envelope or a package.

  It would have been Greek to the Greeks. “Unfortunately,” as the Scottish philatelist James Alexander Mackay wrote, “his knowledge of Greek was not as faultless as his logic. He wished to convey a love (philos) of things which signified that no tax (telos) had to be paid, e.g., a stamp denoting prepayment. Strictly speaking, therefore, the word should have been atelophily.”

  Or perhaps “timbrophily,” a term mentioned by Stephen Satchell, a longtime collector who is an economist and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and J.F.W. Auld, a stamp auctioneer, after dismissing “philatelist” as describing “a lover of postmarks rather than a lover of stamps.”

  Philatelists may feel passion for postmarks, but they are even more passionate about stamps. Herpin’s term— philately—has set the tone for stamp collecting ever since, at least in the mind of the general public: studious, dry, maybe boring, especially in Second Empire France, with racy Offenbach operettas, the Théâtre du Vaudeville and—four years after Herpin’s grumblings—the Folies Bergére. And later, much later, an American philatelic writer declared that a stamp was nothing but a tax receipt. What could be less thrilling than a tax receipt?

  And stamps were also time-consuming—who knows how many countless hours Vaughan would have spent poring over albums—but then, they still are. In 2015, Yahoo reported that fantasy players spent an average of five hundred minutes a month creating dream-team rosters in football, baseball, or basketball on its site—only about forty-five minutes a day. To stamp collectors, that is no time at all. Surely teenage boys in the mid-to-1 ate nineteenth century had that much time to spend sifting through canceled letters in the hunt for the one-of-a-kind stamp. They were infected with collection-itis, even if they never stumbled across the one great stamp.

  Vaughan was not looking for a megabuck payoff, but still the one-cent magenta proved to be hard to get rid of. He wanted money for more stamps and decided it had to go. He took it to Neil Ross McKinnon, who was well known in British Guiana, not only as the first mayor of New Amsterdam, an outlying town in British Guiana, but as an early philatelist. McKinnon turned him away, at least at first. McKinnon objected to the cut corners and grumbled that the stamp “appeared to be a bad specimen,” as the British Guiana Philatelic Journal put it.

  Vaughan tried persuasion, telling McKinnon he wanted money for nicer stamps, an argument that apparently melted McKinnon’s resistance. “After some hesitation,” the Journal reported, “[McKinnon] said he would risk six shillings on it … duly impressing on [Vaughan] the great risk he was running in paying 6s.”

  Maybe McKinnon really believed that he would be stuck with the homely stamp, that its value would sink to one or two shillings—or, worse, to nothing at all. Maybe he worried that he would feel foolish, that other collectors would make fun of him for buying something so obviously worthless.

  Five years later, when McKinnon sold the best of his collection, he posted a profit of 800 percent.

  Vaughan would live to nearly ninety and never lose interest in stamps. In the 1970s, W.A. Townsend and F.G. Howe, in their study of stamps of British Guiana, would write that Vaughan “rose to the top of the British Guiana Philatelic Society” and wrote “many accurate notes” for its journal. Coming from two famous British experts who prided themselves on exhaustive research, that was high praise indeed.

  Townsend and Howe were exacting. Philately is exacting. It demands an eye and a memory for details, for the intricacies of designs, for tiny differences between one batch of stamps and another. No wonder philatelists prize mistakes—easy-to-spot mistakes like the Inverted Jenny, and subtler ones. In 1967, Guyana, then newly independent, reproduced the one-cent magenta on a five-cent commemorative that carried the words “the worlds rarest stamp.” The lack of an apostrophe earned the commemorative a place as a howler on a website called “Postage Stamp Design Errors.”

  Stamp collect
ors have been mocked often enough—or belittled or disparaged—to have learned that, yes, it takes one to know one. “Devoted philatelists don’t go around announcing their predilection,” the British writer Simon Garfield wrote in 2008 in explaining why it was easier to tell his wife about his fling with another woman than to tell her about his thing with stamps. “Only fellow philatelists completely sympathize with the obsession. Socially [stamps] may embarrass me (‘You collect stamps? You? Who once followed The Clash on tour?’).”

  But why? Why do stamp collectors collect? “Do we collect in order to touch the past and thereby escape the present, thus making collecting a form of nostalgia?” John Bryant, an English professor whose academic work centers on Herman Melville and the Transcendentalists, asked in the Handbook of American Popular Culture in 1989. “Do we collect because we want to know the world, or because we enjoy pretty things? Do we collect, quite simply, because the things, pretty or not … are begging to be collected?” Bryant did not answer those questions directly, but his biographical sketch in the first volume of that multivolume work answered another—what, exactly, do philatelists do? “Of an evening,” it said, “he will fiddle with a stamp collection that he has maintained since the age of ten.”

  Many collectors started earlier than they could have started following punk bands. James Alexander Mackay claimed to be a Mozart of stamps, having discovered philately at age four. They know the euphoric highs. They also know there can be a dangerous progression beyond casual stamp collecting. Maybe they didn’t plan to spend the rest of their lives amassing stamps—it just happened. “It’s an obsession,” the Israeli billionaire Joseph D. Hackmey told me, explaining why he had spent so much time (thirty years) and so much money (tens of millions) gathering stamps from New Zealand—among them the only three-penny lilacs from 1862 known to exist.

  New Zealand was not his only specialty. Hackmey also assembled a prize-winning collection of Ceylon stamps, and his collection of Romanian material expanded beyond stamps to include the single most expensive copy of a newspaper. For $1.1 million, he got what the later owners of the one-cent magenta never did: the newspaper that came with the stamp. Or, in the case of the November 11, 1858, issue of Zimbrul şi Vulturul that Hackmey acquired after outbidding the Romanian Ministry of Culture and National Patrimony, the stamps. Eight rare Moldavian “Bull’s Head” stamps were pasted across the top of the front page before the newspaper was mailed.

  If it’s any comfort to philatelists, collection-itis is not confined to people with a passion for stamps. People collect anything and everything: baseball cards, Matchbox cars, Homer Simpson bobble-head figures, vintage lunch boxes. There was the dentist who collected incandescent light bulbs—sixty thousand of them, including the world’s biggest, a fifty-thousand-watter. There was the teetotaling nonsmoker who collected miniature liquor bottles and, from cigarette packs, Alberto Vargas pinups. And there was the funeral director whom the New York Times described as a “Giotto of Maryland” for carving the masterpieces in a duck-decoy museum. A series of books called “Pleasures and Treasures” in the 1960s covered everything from arms and armor to French porcelain. And stamps.

  The definition of collectibles changed as fads and fashions came and went. But the reason people collect has not changed. “Collecting fills a hole in life,” Garfield wrote, “and gives it a semblance of meaning. When men get together to talk about their passions, we don’t just talk about what we love—our cars, our sports, our romantic yearnings—but also how these desires have cost us, and what we have lost. We try to regain what we cannot. We talk about the one that got away—the prized possessions— as if that would have made everything right.”

  That’s Stamp World for you.

  FIVE

  £120

  1878: Glasgow and London

  Neil Ross McKinnon had snapped up much of his collection when “old” stamps from British Guiana were cheap. He probably figured that prices—which had risen somewhat in a “stamp rush” in the 1870s, as stamp collecting became more and more popular—would climb even faster as the years went by. The money must have seemed alluring, considering how low the prices had been for McKinnon and Vaughan and anyone else who had bought and held British Guiana stamps from the beginning: Vaughan remembered selling British Guianan cottonreels for £1, equivalent to about $5 in today’s currency. But those were cottonreels, and everyone knew that there were only so many cottonreels. There were other already-recognized rarities, and the race was on to locate them. Advertisements promising cash for stamps, any stamps, sent would-be philatelists scavenging “among private letters, in banks, merchants’ offices, government offices, etc., as opportunity offered, with the result that hundreds of the early issues were found,” Arthur D. Ferguson, a founder of the British Guiana Philatelic Society and the longtime editor of the British Guiana Philatelic Journal, reported nearly fifty years later. It wasn’t always the original owners who profited, and it wasn’t always committed collectors who were the treasure hunters. Unlike Vaughan, many had no legal claim to the stamps they snapped up and sold. Ferguson complained that some of the stamp hunting was done “without permission by clerks, office-boys, etc.”—who sold the stamps and pocketed the money.

  McKinnon assembled what would have been an enviable collection of stamps from British Guiana, except that in the mid-1870s, there was nothing enviable about it: no one cared about a collection of stamps from British Guiana—not yet, anyway. Stamps from British Guiana were still too new, and British Guiana was too far from the mainstream, as it always had been. By 1878, McKinnon owned the five most precious stamps from British Guiana: the four known copies of the 1850 two-cent cottonreel on rose-colored paper, which was also a provisional, a stamp printed locally rather than in London— as well as the one-cent magenta (though, of course, he did not understand that it was unique and would someday be the most valuable stamp in the world).

  Collectors who resisted the temptation to sell early certainly did well. A middle-aged London barrister with a preposterous double last name, William Hughes-Hughes, started a stamp collection in 1859 and became so immersed in philately that he joined the high-powered coterie that met on Saturday afternoons at the Rev. Francis John Stainforth’s rectory. It was the world’s first local stamp club, but when it came to collecting, stamps were not Stainforth’s only passion. He was also a conchologist (mollusks and shells) and assembled a large library of plays and poems by women, which is intriguing, because women were not allowed in the philatelic group. His catalogue—of course a consummate collector like Stainforth would catalogue his holdings—contains some six thousand entries, but judging by his “Wants” list,” there were nine hundred more items that he never acquired.

  Historians of philately recognize Hughes-Hughes and Stainforth’s club as the one that eventually formed the Philatelic Society, London, the forerunner of the Royal Philatelic Society London, which David Redden visited with the one-cent magenta. Historians of Parliament remember Hughes-Hughes’s father as “one of the most thoroughly unpopular” MPs in the nineteenth century, mocked by Charles Dickens for “barking tremendously,” like a firefighter’s dog.

  The younger Hughes-Hughes’s passion for stamps did not last. He stopped collecting in 1874, calculating that he had spent £69 on holdings that included one of the blue four-cent stamps from British Guiana that were probably printed at the Gazette at the same time as the one-cent magenta. But he was not ready to part with his collection. Twenty-two years later, when it was finally liquidated, it went for £3,000, or more than $441,000 in today’s dollars.

  Stamps were also appreciating in British Guiana by then. In 1896, the same year in which Hughes-Hughes’s stamps were sold, a church asked members of the congregation to bring in old stamps. The church was in debt, and the minister wanted to pay off the mortgage. He hoped to raise money by selling the stamps to collectors. A woman rummaged around at home and discovered two early four-cent stamps, enough, she thought, to knock a few pounds off the chu
rch’s debt. The minister went to thank her, and asked if she had any other treasures. She said she did not, but handed the minister a basket with envelopes containing old bills and receipts. One caught the minister’s eye. It was addressed “Miss Rose, Blankenburg” and carried a pair of two-cent cottonreels.

  Miss Rose was in the room, and when the minister said the envelope was worth a great deal, she exclaimed, “Thank God! I am at last able to give something worthwhile.” The minister sold her envelope for £200, all but putting the church in the black.

  McKinnon, though, had decided to cash out long before then, and enlisted help from another Scottish expatriate in British Guiana, one who stood to inherit a considerable fortune back in Glasgow. Just as everyone who was anyone in Paris after World War I seemed to know Gerald and Sara Murphy, everyone who was anyone in British Guiana in the mid-1870s must have known Robert Wylie Hill. (He was apparently not related to Rowland Hill, who invented the postage stamp.)

  Unlike expats in British Guiana who set their sights on the nineteenth-century sugar frontier and worked as managers on plantations with distinctly Scottish names like Glasgow or Edinburgh—or who found their way to government jobs, as Vaughan did when he grew up—Wylie Hill seemed to see his mission as only slightly different from Columbus’s. He wanted to go where few white men had gone—up the Amazon, into the rain forests, and he wanted to take the evidence back to Scotland and sell it. He was absolutely confident that there was a market back home in Scotland for stuffed birds from South America. Wylie Hill had returned to Glasgow by the late 1870s and had used his inheritance to build a department store, where he sold his birds.