One Cent Magenta Page 8

  Ferrary hated his father, who, it turned out, wasn’t his father at all. In his twenties, Ferrary—and probably the rest of the household—heard Ferrary’s parents quarreling. The duke had apparently just learned that the duchess had had an affair with an Austrian army officer around the time Ferrary was born. Some years later, the officer, by then Count de La Renotiere von Kriegsfeld, adopted the middle-aged Ferrary. At the same time, the count adopted a second man, said to have been Ferrary’s half-brother.

  Most accounts agree that Ferrary never married. But in 1893, the New-York Tribune told Ferrary’s story with a twist. On the same page as articles headlined “A Bride-Hunting Prince” and “From Mr. Greeley’s Pen,” it divulged that after renouncing his titles, Ferrary had found work as a tutor in mathematics “and lived modestly but honestly on a small income.” He may have moved to a Left Bank apartment for a while when he was in his twenties, but he had the money to be welcomed in the right Right Bank circles. And in one salon, the article revealed, he met a Russian princess who was “rich, beautiful and [possessed] all the attractions of the high-class Tartar.” It was love, the Tribune wrote, “and to please her, [Ferrary] laid claim to the parental millions.” The Russian emperor even awarded him a title: the Duke di Ferrari.

  “The marriage took place,” the Tribune reported, “but it proved to be unhappy,” and Ferrary and the princess “decided to live apart.” It was the same Ferrary: “He has one hobby—the collection of postage stamps—and his collection is said by many experts to be the finest in Europe.”

  Not only did Ferrary have some ambivalence about his wealth and titles, he did not look the part of an aristocratic Parisian. The stamp writer Fred J. Melville noted that Ferrary was “anything but spick and span, rather dowdy, in fact, apparently careless of his attire, except for the yachting cap he always affected.” The cap was emblazoned with three stars, and in stamp shops across Europe, the clerks snapped to attention when they saw it. One account has a worker whispering to a buddy, “Look sharp, for Gawd’s sake! Here comes Martell’s Three Star.” Apparently Ferrary’s cap had stars arranged like those on the label of bottles of Martell’s cognac.

  Ferrary had taken up stamps as a distraction from the worries that preoccupied his parents. When he was ten years old and traveling in Germany, Ferrary was upset by bad news from the front: French forces under Napoleon III had beaten the Austrian army. This was when he first became intrigued by stamps. Ironically, considering the subject at hand, the Austrians lost the Battle of Magenta. (Ferrary had nothing to do with designating the stamp’s color as magenta. That had happened even before it left British Guiana.)

  His mother approved of his hobby—she may have been the one to nudge him to start collecting. She paid for whatever caught his eye. By the time he was a teenager, he had encountered the Parisian dealer Pierre Mahe, and after years as a regular customer, Ferrary hired Mahe to oversee his holdings in 1874. Thomas Ridpath, who had bought the one-cent magenta from McKinnon in 1878, must have dealt with Mahé when he offered to sell it.

  Ridpath sold him only the one stamp. No doubt Ferrary would have bought more. He bought the Australian collection of Sir Daniel Cooper, the governor of New South Wales, in the same year. A couple of years later, he bought a two-volume Japanese collection from Edward Denny Bacon. A couple of years after that, Ferrary bought much of the renowned Frederick Adolphus Philbrick collection for £8,000, as much as $12.1 million in today’s dollars. Mahé maintained that even without Philbrick’s British stamps, which were not included, this “made” the Ferrary collection. Later still Ferrary snapped up Baron Arthur de Rothschild’s collection. That brought to seven the number of Post Office Mauritius stamps that Ferrary owned. And in 1894, he acquired the Swedish Treskilling Yellow from 1857, another stamp discovered by a teenager hunting for treasure stamps among old family papers. The Stockholm dealer Heinrich Lichtenstein realized the mistake: the teenager’s three-skilling stamp was the color of an eight-skilling stamp. Like Louis Vernon Vaughan, the teenager walked away with a lot of money (for a teenager, anyway)—seven kronor, or about $223 in today’s currency.

  By the early twentieth century, some philatelists tallied and toted and guessed that Ferrary had spent as much as $1.2 million on stamps (equivalent to $34.9 million today). But he did not like to see his name in the papers. “For years,” L.N. and Maurice Williams write, “the very name of Ferrary was spoken in philatelic circles, almost in a whisper, and reference in print to him and his stamps was usually in the form of ‘a Parisian collection.’” Those who knew, knew; those who did not, wondered.

  Ferrary’s pro-German loyalty made his life complicated as World War I spread across Europe. Breaking his rule about not traveling with his stamps, Ferrary played the part of a rich man on the run, fleeing to neutral Switzerland, carrying along only a few stamp albums that held mostly Greek stamps. As the fighting continued, Ferrary managed to crisscross Europe in pursuit of stamps. He died in a taxi in Lausanne, on the way back to his hotel after trying to buy yet another stamp. He had a heart attack in the back seat.

  Ferrary had spelled out the details of what was to happen to his stamp collection after he was gone. His will said it was all to go to Austria—specifically, to the Reichspost Museum in Berlin. The French would not hear of that. The French government seized the stamps in the Hôtel Matignon, and after several years of legal wrangling, interrupted by the necessary sorting and cataloguing, announced a sale. This was no one-day affair. There were so many stamps in the Ferrary collection that it took fourteen sales between 1921 and 1925 to auction them all. The one-cent magenta was not even included in the first sale.

  When it finally went on the block, the catalogue described it in French: “GUYANE ANGLAISE. 1856. 1 c. noir sur carmin, catalogué chez Yvert et Tellier sous le no. 12 et sous le no. 23 dans le catalogue de Stanley Gibbons. C’est le seul exemplaire connu, obl.” The only known example.

  But the one-cent magenta’s uniqueness was not why it set off a bidding war. Ferrary—secretive and obsessive, and the quintessential Mr. Big Spender—would have loved the caper that unfolded: the intrigue, the preposterousness and the money. Especially the money. The enormous bids made Ferrary look like the smartest stamp buyer in history, not just the most voracious. Suddenly, his purchase of the one-cent magenta looked like a bargain, for in a matter of minutes, it became all the more unaffordable.

  The auction opened after an intriguing twist that John le Carré would have loved, the curious incident of the stamp men in the restaurant—an overheard conversation that tipped off one potential bidder about how much his main rival could spend. The two antagonists were seated within earshot of each other, although if the story is to be believed, Hugo Griebert, a London dealer, did not see Maurice Burrus, who was, like Ferrary, wealthy and willing to spend. Burrus, whose money came from a family tobacco business, had been the biggest individual buyer at the first Ferrary sale. He had bought a two-cent Hawaiian “Missionary” for $14,150, setting the record for a single lot at that initial auction.

  Burrus might have wondered why the one-cent magenta was not on the block that first day. The philatelic writer Kent B. Stiles asked the question in a stamp journal, estimating that the one-cent magenta would sell for between $10,000 and $15,000 ($139,000 to $208,000 in today’s dollars). But he said that eyebrows had been raised by its absence: “Is that stamp still in the Ferrary collection? If so, have any other rarities been sold privately[?] If they have, who are the purchasers and where are those stamps now?” Stiles suspected the French government of strategizing, of taking a wait-and-see approach, of wanting to gauge the interest in the lesser treasures “before it placed the more desirable items … on the market.”

  If that was the French strategy, it paid off quickly. “Everyone is asking in London when the unique ‘Ferrarity’ will be offered,” the philatelic writer Fred J. Melville observed in Stamp Collecting magazine amid suspicion that the one-cent magenta really was that kind of a Ferrarity: “The ol
d story that it’s a defective four-cent” was making the rounds. Gerard Gilbert, the Parisian expert commissioned to catalogue the Ferrary collection, had examined it, but Melville noted that “until M. Gilbert has decided that it is good, the stamp may not be put to the test” of an auction.

  The test came eight months later, shortly after the scene in the restaurant. Griebert was the chatterbox, and Burrus said later that he could hear every word of the story Griebert told at his table. And what a cynical story it was: Griebert blithely said his client was an American who had given him a nearly unlimited bid—a bid with the then unheard-of maximum of $60,000 (equivalent to just over $850,000 in today’s dollars). That was all Burrus needed to know, but Griebert could not stop yammering away. He announced that he himself “did not believe” in the one-cent magenta—he had doubts about its authenticity and suspected it was a four-cent provisional that had been altered and fobbed off on the philatelic world.

  By coincidence, that was exactly what Burrus had deduced. He maintained—even as late as 1951—that the one-cent had been created by rubbing out the F in “FOUR” and the S in “CENTS”—and transforming the UR after the O to NE.

  Burrus decided to show up Griebert. He thought that the game he had in mind would be amusing. It would also be expensive, but he knew that Griebert’s client had the money. Never mind that the big names of philately had vouched for the one-cent magenta, starting with Pemberton’s simple declaration nearly more than forty years earlier. The eminent British philatelists W.A. Townsend and F.G. Howe noted that the Mahés—“father and son,” both of whom worked for Ferrary over the years—had “accepted and approved it, as [had] Sir Edward [Denny] Bacon.” Burrus still wanted to make Griebert’s client pay until it hurt.

  Lot No. 295 opened at 50,000 francs, and the price climbed in 5,000-franc increments to 200,000, with Burrus matching Griebert at every step, even as other bidders dropped out, unwilling or unable to risk so much money. The denouement was exactly what Burrus imagined. At 295,000 francs, Griebert indicated that he would go to 300,000. Burrus decided to end his charade, and dropped out. Griebert’s total, once the French sales tax was added, was 352,500 francs, or $32,500 ($459,000 in today’s dollars).

  Redden’s pre-sale catalogue in 2014 dismissed the tale of the overheard conversation because, among other things, Burrus had acquired another important item from the early days in British Guiana at one of the earlier Ferrary sales, an 1851 two-cent cottonreel pair on cover that went for $19,000. But Burrus turned the one-cent magenta into the single most expensive item in any of the Ferrary sales, and he had spent not a penny on it. That distinction went to Griebert’s American client, the richest man in Utica, New York—Arthur Hind.

  SEVEN

  $32,500

  1922: The Plutocrat with the Cigar

  In the story about the plutocrat and the cigar, the plutocrat was Arthur Hind, and the cigar was a Pennsylvania stogie, not a hand-rolled Cuban Cohiba. Hind looked like a down-market Daddy Warbucks— fleshier and not so worldly. Daddy Warbucks, according to no less an authority than Little Orphan Annie, had ten zillion dollars. Hind, according to no less an authority than Hind himself, had at least $7 million, and he bought a lot of stamps—thousands and thousands of stamps, so many he could not keep track of them all—before the Depression knocked his net worth down to only a million or so. A careful inventory of his stamp holdings ran to hundreds of pages, as thick as a telephone book. But the plain little one-cent magenta was his most important purchase, for it was the one that brought him what he cherished the most: fame.

  Like Daddy Warbucks, Hind was an industrialist, self-centered and self-important. He was a fussy dresser, as one might expect of a multimillionaire in the fabric business. But he remained puzzlingly rough around the edges. There he stands in a fine-looking suit, a blank expression on his wide face as the camera snaps the photograph, but one trouser leg is noticeably shorter than the other. Surely he could have found a competent tailor.

  Hind had been born in England, and like the very real Andrew Carnegie before him, had struggled and sweated in a textile mill when he was barely beyond grade school. And like Carnegie, who was only five feet tall, Hind was unusually short. Anyone who asked about Hind would have been told that when he was not quite sixty, he had taken up with a woman who was less than half his age and that they lived in upstate New York, far from the spotlights and celebrities—so far away that the stamp expert Kent B. Stiles commented that Hind “was never publicly identified with philately” until he bought the one-cent magenta.

  Once he had it, though, he lived for the attention it brought him. Hind capitalized on the one-cent magenta the way a politician would, but for Hind it was an impolitic move. Philatelists do not promote themselves with souvenir cards. His carried a reproduction of the prize and a braggart’s caption: “The most valuable postage stamp in the world. The only known copy of the British Guiana one cent.” As if that were not enough—as if he had done anything more than spend extravagantly—he put his signature on the card.

  The story about the second stamp and the cigar surfaced in a Virginia stamp magazine in 1938, five years after Hind’s death. The claim, in a long letter to the editor, was straightforward: “I had one too!”

  The letter writer said he had been a cabin boy on a steamship that sailed to British Guiana from time to time. On a trip years before, he had bought “a packet of old local letters, some bills and receipts of a real old man” who was a relative of a drinking buddy. The purchase “cost me a few rums,” he wrote. “I mounted the stamps in an album I made myself, and that was that”—until he read about the Ferrary sale. “I said to myself, ‘D--- if I don’t think I’ve got its twin!’”

  The man described driving to Utica and, after calling Hind on the telephone, finding his way to Hind’s house. He took out his stamp album and handed it to Hind, who grabbed his magnifying glass. “He went over to a place like a vault built into the wall of that room and got out his stamp, his one-cent Guiana. They were as alike as peas.” There were only two differences: the original postmaster’s signature on his stamp had more of a flourish than the signature on Hind’s, and his stamp had a slight tear. (He did not say whether his also had clipped corners.)

  Hind “looked at me, and you could hear my heart thumping,” the man wrote, “and I guess he heard his, he was that still with excitement.”

  “Well?” Hind asked.

  The man replied: “One of us has to own both, that’s the way I figured it.” The letter writer named a price he was willing to pay Hind—“a big sum,” but exactly how much, he did not say.

  Hind said, “If it’s worth that to you, it’s worth twice to me”—but insisted on secrecy: “Not even my secretary must know.” Hind promised to pay in cash—“I’d rather not give a check”—and directed the owner to return the following day to complete the deal. Even with a fireproof safe within reach, Hind apparently did not keep that much money around.

  The man stuck to the schedule Hind prescribed and showed up the next day, dreaming about life after surrendering the stamp and fretting about the money he would walk away with. He feared he would be robbed on the street as he left.

  But first he had to close the deal. Hind took the man’s stamp. “He held it in his hand and compared it with his again,” the man wrote. “Then he put his away.” Hind handed the man the money and offered him a cigar—“I put it in my pocket; I don’t smoke, but I wanted to keep it.”

  Hind lit one for himself. Hind “looked at my stamp again,” and then did the one thing the man had not imagined. Hind touched the stamp he had just acquired to the flame of the match he had just struck. The man tried to grab the burning stamp but it was too late, and Hind knew it. He smiled mischievously and said, “There’s only one magenta one-cent Guiana.”

  So what if the story is too good to be true. It presented Hind as the stamp world saw him, with his devil-may-care extravagance, and it bared the resentment that collectors harbored against him. “He
had more money than knowledge of stamps,” Sir John Wilson, the British expert who was Keeper of the Royal Philatelic Collection from 1938 to 1969, wrote in the 1950s. “Where he was advised that a stamp was sufficiently rare and sensational, he would pay almost any price for it.” No doubt some philatelists snickered at the mention of Hind’s name. Hind must have known. He himself repeated a story he said had originated with a British clergyman during an “anti-philatelic outburst.” The minister imagined the dialogue between Hind and Saint Peter at the gate of heaven.

  “I crave admittance,” Hind announced.

  “Have you fed the poor, visited the sick, relieved distress?” Peter asked.

  “No,” Hind replied, “I really hadn’t time, but I have a one-cent British Guiana stamp in a greaseproof envelope, for which I paid £7,000. Even His Majesty the King of Great Britain personally congratulated me upon [my] acquiring it. Would you like to see it?”

  “Such tiny fragments will readily burn in hell,” Peter declared, slamming shut the gate.