One Cent Magenta Read online

  For McKinnon, trying to dispose of the one-cent magenta, the problem was that it had not been discovered yet. It was not listed in any of the stamp catalogues. The philatelic experts in Britain had heard about other provisionals from British Guiana, including the blue four-cent stamps that were printed at the same time in the same place, but they knew nothing about the one-cent magenta. McKinnon had to bring it to their attention in a way that legitimized it. He realized that this was a job for someone else, someone who was as close to being an insider as there was—someone in Britain, of course, and someone who could serve as the one-cent magenta’s advocate and publicist. He had someone in mind, a man who was already an established authority in the nascent universe of philately, an expert who could weigh in on the one-cent magenta’s authenticity—and who, if he believed in the stamp and gave it his imprimatur, could spread the word. The only problem was that McKinnon did not know him, except by reputation. But McKinnon knew just who could put the one-cent magenta in front of him: Wylie Hill.

  And so McKinnon had sent his five most precious stamps across the ocean to Wylie Hill in Glasgow with a request to get them to the renowned stamp expert Edward Loines Pemberton and, if Pemberton wanted them, to sell them to him.

  It was a pragmatic choice. Pemberton was the coauthor of a groundbreaking work on philatelic forgeries, which were flooding the market and threatening the value of legitimate rarities. If Pemberton vouched for the one-cent magenta, collectors would believe it was neither a forgery nor a fake. Anyone who wanted to make the case that it was, say, a four-cent stamp that had been altered would have a hard time going against Pemberton.

  Pemberton was a prodigy. Before stamp collecting was weighed down by “its ponderous monographs and its obese catalogues,” as the Philatelic Journal of Great Britain put it in 1922, there was Pemberton, an authority who spoke as if he had been present at the creation, and he pretty much was. He had caught the stamp bug when stamps were in their infancy and had “mastered every minute peculiarity,” according to The Philatelic Record, which was written and read by masters of those peculiarities. By the time he attended the very first stamp auction ever held in London—in 1872, when he was twenty-seven—Pemberton was an old-timer in the stamp business. As a mere teenager, he had been considered as much of an authority as “many others who were his seniors by nearly half a century!”

  Forgers hated Pemberton, but collectors respected him as the coauthor of a groundbreaking work on forgeries. He happily did more than just name names. His Journal promised the “addresses of all ascertained dealers in forgeries.”

  Pemberton had heard about the four-cent stamps from 1856 and had dismissed them as “purely provisional.” “Ship with motto in plain oblong lettered frame,” he wrote in The Stamp Collector’s Handbook, which he described as “a plain and strictly accurate list of postage stamps.”

  But it was incomplete.

  It arrived at Pemberton’s house in a package, a dowdy twenty-two-year-old stamp. But Pemberton recognized its historic significance, and pushed it into the spotlight with his eyes, his memory, and maybe a magnifying glass.

  His tools were rudimentary. If he had a microscope, it was probably little more than a couple of lenses in a tube. If he had other tools that modern stamp collectors take for granted, they, too, were rudimentary—tongs, perhaps, to keep dust and sweat from his fingers from damaging the stamps he examined. He had his pick of what was available, and the Philatelic Journal of Great Britain sighed that “it [made] one’s mouth water” to think about the stamps that he got to see. “There are collectors who are just better at seeing things than others,” Ted Wilson, the registrar of the National Postal Museum in Washington, told me. “I’ve seen people look at things, and they’re able to see something that somebody who’s looked at it a hundred times didn’t see. You can tell the difference between people who are good and people who are incredible that way. He fell into the latter category. He had the eyes.” Somehow, Pemberton saw everything, remembered everything, before everything was in catalogues.

  But Pemberton had another advantage in examining the one-cent magenta when he did. Wilson speculates that the stamp has faded with age and looked “significantly better” when Pemberton saw it than it does now. “He was in a better position to make a judgment than we would be today—if we didn’t have the fancy equipment we have,” he said.

  Pemberton did not travel to the places that stamps came from. The mail brought them to him, directly or through intermediaries. When Wylie Hill sent him McKinnon’s stamps, Wylie Hill quoted a price of £110, or just over $26,000 in today’s dollars.

  Pemberton, then thirty-three and already frail from rheumatic fever in his late twenties, looked over McKinnon’s collection and judged the one-cent magenta to be the real thing, an authentic stamp that the philatelic world had never seen. He wrote to Sir Edward Denny Bacon, another pillar of British philately, in November 1878 that “the lot included a ‘ONE cent, red, 1856!!!” When E.L. Pemberton talked, philatelists listened, and E.L. Pemberton was practically shouting.

  If he had not ratified the one-cent magenta as he did— if Pemberton, the reigning expert on fakes, had ruled that it was bogus—it would have gone back to Wylie Hill. Perhaps Wylie Hill would have returned it to McKinnon with a note that began, “Sorry, old chum.” Or maybe Wylie Hill would not have bothered to send it back: “Sorry, old chum—I took the liberty of destroying the worthless and rather ugly one-cent magenta. I’m sure you will agree that I did what was best under the circumstances.”

  As it was, Pemberton called the one-cent magenta “queer” and “a dreadfully poor copy.” But it was authentic. Pemberton never got around to writing out a detailed explanation of why he was sure it was real, but with his capital letters and exclamation points, he cemented the one-cent magenta’s place in history.

  He cemented its place in history in another way: by not buying it.

  All he had to do was to send Wylie Hill a check, perhaps only a deposit if he did not have the money in the bank. Pemberton was Pemberton, and Wylie Hill would have accommodated him. Instead, according to the Williamses, “for some reason Pemberton dallied.” He returned McKinnon’s stamps to Wylie Hill without making clear that he wanted them.

  If he thought he still had the right of first refusal, he underestimated the wily Wylie Hill, who, “after waiting for some time in vain,” moved on. David Redden maintains that Hill was simply following McKinnon’s orders when he sent letters offering the collection to other stamp dealers, among them Thomas Ridpath of Liverpool, who hopped on a train to Glasgow, examined McKinnon’s stamps, borrowed the money to buy them, and caught a train home to Liverpool, all in twenty-four hours. Ridpath paid £120. Already the one-cent magenta’s price was climbing.

  But while Ridpath was rushing off to Scotland, Pemberton changed his tune. Now he wanted the one-cent magenta.

  Speedy as the British mail service was, Ridpath was not to be beaten. Pemberton sent along a check, but by the time it landed in Wylie Hill’s mailbox, it was too late. McKinnon’s stamps now belonged to Ridpath. The transaction could not be undone, not even for Pemberton.

  Ever since, philatelists have wondered whether Ridpath understood the coup he had pulled off. Pemberton certainly did. He realized the opportunity he had missed.

  Ridpath did not hold on to the one-cent magenta. Within days of his marathon trip to Glasgow, the stamp was off to Paris. Ridpath was confident that he could unload the strange little stamp for more than he had paid for it.

  Like McKinnon, he had someone in mind —someone who, just by buying it, would make the one-cent magenta famous.

  SIX

  £150

  1878: The Man in the Yachting Cap

  Late one afternoon in May 1886, three thousand members of the moneyed aristocracy in France—a thousand more than could have squeezed into the lavish and still fairly new home of the Opéra de Paris—strolled into a palace that had once belonged to the diplomat Talleyrand, who had made hi
mself indispensable to regime after regime. Princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, viscounts and barons, the wedding guests passed under a balcony with sculptured lion’s heads and sauntered through some of the most opulent rooms in Paris. Wedding gifts poured in, too, for the occasion was a marriage, an arranged marriage that united two of Europe’s royal families. But it was “undoubtedly a love match,” the New York Times wrote, surprised that that thing called love had quickened the groom’s humdrum heart.

  One of the presents was a stunning tiara commissioned by the bride’s father-in-law, King Luís I of Portugal, who was as popular in Lisbon for translating Hamlet and Othello as for handling the affairs of state. The Times noted that the bride’s father—“a tall, robust, powerful looking man” who had spent his thirties in the United States and had served under General George McClellan in the Union Army during the Civil War—was a published author in his own right: “The most important of his literary productions is his History of the Civil War in America, a large and exhaustive work.”

  The bride, who carried a lovely wreath of orange blossoms, was “rather too tall,” the Times carped, but she had the look of royalty behind her lace veil: “It would not be easy to find more aristocratic looking hands or smaller, more shell-like ears than those of this princess.”

  The one-cent magenta knew all about the wedding. It was close enough to hear the buzz of the crowd, the swish of the dresses, the airy sound of the orchestra. The one-cent magenta knew who flirted with whom, who got tipsy on the champagne, and who made a toast so inflammatory that Parliament said never again—a law passed the following week banned gatherings of that many nobles, for fear they would decide to overthrow the government.

  The one-cent magenta knew all this because the palace, known as the Hôtel Matignon, where the wedding took place, had been the one-cent magenta’s home for eight years. Later on, the stamp’s neighbors on the Rue de Varenne, down from Les Invalides in the seventh arrondissement, would include Rodin, Rilke, and Edith Wharton.

  The stamp’s owner was an eccentric aristocrat, though he had long since shed his many titles. He tolerated Paris, though he disliked the French and insisted that his heart was with “my beloved Austria and my dear Germany.” Philippe Arnold de la Renotiere von Ferrary bought any stamp that came on the market, it seemed. His huge collection even included any number of fakes, and he knew it. He patronized one dealer who not only trafficked in forgeries but printed ersatz stamps in a back room. Ferrary supposedly bought one that was printed while he waited in the front room. The ink was still a little wet when the stamp was brought out and he touched it, but he did not mind.

  “I would sooner buy one hundred forgeries than miss that variety I could not find elsewhere,” Ferrary said. Collectors soon dubbed the forgeries he accumulated “Ferrarities.”

  The one-cent magenta was the real thing. Ferrary was the stamp’s first owner who lived in a grand setting, who amassed an astonishing collection, and who kept philatelic experts on his payroll. There are other parallels between Ferrary and another, later owner: brief marriages that didn’t last, deep attachments to their mothers, passionately conservative views on politics and patriotism. At their deaths, the one-cent magenta was auctioned off with lawyers and executors looking on. Ferrary, though, did not kill anyone and did not die in prison. But that is getting far ahead of the story.

  After Ferrary bought the one-cent magenta, it wasn’t seen again in public until 1922. That only added to its allure. Stamp collectors still wonder what the one-cent magenta looked like when Ferrary owned it: how bright was it the first time he saw it, bundled it up, put it on a shelf. Whether he had it recolored after Bacon described its surface as rubbed in 1891. How much it had faded by the time he died nearly forty years later. And how often he took it off the shelf, turned it over, studied the initials, held a magnifying glass over the smudgy type, and defended the cut corners. Surely he loved the cut corners. Ferrary was known to cut stamps off covers long after his advisers pointed out that no one did that anymore, that the fashion in philately was to save the whole envelope containing a rare stamp. Maybe he sliced the corners off the one-cent magenta. There is no way to know.

  By all accounts, Ferrary was a reclusive man who let in only a few trusted friends. Charles J. Phillips, the philatelist who had owned the venerable London dealer Stanley Gibbons and Company since 1890, was “one of the few people privileged to have the run of the collection whenever desired.” The rest of the world had to imagine what the one-cent magenta looked like. As the stamp writer Alvin F. Harlow observed, “When a good stamp fell into his collection, it was spoken of as having gone to the graveyard”—it was not seen again, or so philatelists believed. Ferrary wrote little except for a couple of articles in philatelic journals when he was young and, when he was older, complaining letters to the editors of stamp magazines that used his royal titles. He or his assistants let Sir Edward Denny Bacon examine the stamp in Paris in 1891, and Bacon pulled out all the stops. If anyone had doubts after seeing Pemberton’s exclamation points, Bacon meant to settle the matter.

  For his part, Ferrary was all about Ferrary: he knew that the one-cent magenta was spectacular—by most accounts, he had paid £150 for it—and he didn’t mind letting his friends know that he knew. He probably knew, too, that they would spread the stories about his collection. That would make it more valuable than if he allowed ordinary people to see it—the mystery would be gone— and he even turned down requests from people who were anything but ordinary. Ferrary supposedly said no to George V, who invited him to bring the best of his collection to London. Surely George V wanted to see the one-cent magenta. But Ferrary would not take his stamps across the Channel. Ferrary’s excuse was that he had promised his mother that his stamps would never leave the opulent surroundings of the Hotel Matignon. And they were opulent. The Hôtel Matignon set the standard on the supremely fashionable Rue de Varenne. In 1905, when Ferrary was in his fifties, the artist Eugène Atget photographed a fireplace there with a riot of candelabras on the mantel. The chandelier, the tall gilded clock, the floral-print slipcovers on the couches, the plasterwork on the walls—it was all so grand, and so big. Those three thousand wedding guests gossiped and dined and danced without angering the neighbors.

  On her death two years after the wedding, Ferrary’s mother bequeathed the palace to Emperor Franz Joseph for use as the Austrian embassy. But not all of it. One wing was to be Ferrary’s, for the rest of his life, and his stamp business occupied three “philatelic rooms.” Stamp dealers who showed up with treasures to sell had to run a gauntlet—big watchdogs had the run of the courtyard and had to be tied up before visitors entered. Inside was a retinue, Ferrary’s philatelic secretaries and a business manager who put bundles of cash on nails in one room—every denomination up to a thousand francs, fifty thousand francs a week, week after week. Ferrary lived by the honor system. The sellers simply took what they were owed. And when Ferrary went shopping, the stamp-s hop clerks knew not to stand too close. They opened their albums and looked the other way. Ferrary turned the pages, removing the stamps he wanted and putting them in his pocket. Then he left, and the clerks would go through the albums, noting what stamps were missing. The boss sent an invoice. Ferrary’s people sent a check.

  But maybe the one-cent magenta did not spend all its days in the palace. It is possible that Ferrary slipped the stamp out of the palace from time to time for a little show-and-tell. Ferrary didn’t advertise this, of course—why tempt the pickpockets of the world? But pickpockets who read a syndicated newspaper article one Sunday morning in 1906 probably wished they were within easy reach of Ferrary’s threadbare coat. Smoothly, invisibly, they could have slid their fingers into his pockets and stolen his treasures, because—without meaning to—the article portrayed him as the easiest of marks.

  “Ferrary was inspecting an art collection,” the article reported, “when a large and handsome canvas that occupied a great portion of wall space was pointed out to him as t
he most valuable picture in the salon. ‘It is worth all of eighteen hundred pounds,’ ” he was told.

  “‘Then it is not the most valuable picture here,’ replied Ferrary, and he produced a small card case from the depths of a pocket. Inside was a tiny piece of paper, which he carefully held up. ‘This,’ he continued, ‘is far more costly than your beautiful painting.’”

  It was the one-cent magenta, which the article described as “a crude affair whose typographical appearance would not be endorsed by the humblest printer in all Christendom.” The reporter asked how much it was worth, for as is so often the case with newspaper articles, big money was the point. This article appeared under a nine-word headline: “Most Valuable Bit of Paper in the Whole World.”

  “ ‘I prize it so highly,’ answered Ferrary, ‘that if you were this instant to offer me three thousand pounds for it, I would not take it.’ ” How much was £3,000 worth in 1906? The headline writer saved pickpockets the trouble of doing the pounds-to-dollars calculation. The secondary headline read, “Owner Would Not Take $15,000 For It.” That works out to at least $307,000 in today’s dollars.

  Ferrary stored his stamps not in albums but in packets in cupboards in alphabetical order. No one knows how often Ferrary went to the section where he kept the one-cent magenta—or had someone reach there for him—and untied the packet from British Guiana. No one knows how often he marveled at the stamp. The implication is not often. There are accounts that some of the bundles in his stamp rooms were dusty, that no one touched them for years. This suggests a household that was not attended to. That cannot have been the case. Ferrary’s mother had been the richest woman in Europe. There was no Downton Abbey squeeze on the household staff. But perhaps Ferrary allowed no one in his quarters, even to clean.

  Ferrary was named after King Louis Philippe of France, the “citizen king” undermined by the emerging industrial class. If Ferrary was born in 1848, as some accounts maintain, his namesake was out of power before he was out of diapers, and the Ferrary family was soon playing up to Napoleon III. And if Ferrary’s mother was wealthy, his father was almost as well off from holdings in old-fashioned banks and newfangled railroads in Europe and Latin America. His father also had a hand in financing the Suez Canal. The library in the palace contained shelves filled with leather-bound books. After Ferrary’s father died and his mother stepped inside the library for the first time, she discovered that the shelves did not contain the collected works of Montesquieu or Rousseau or Racine or Voltaire; they contained the collected works of her late husband. But his works were not filled with words. Each page of the volumes held a government bond—more than twelve million francs’ worth in all.