One Cent Magenta Read online

  And there were other stories about Hind. “The difficulty in showing stamps to Hind was that he always thought he had something better,” Wilson wrote in a passage about Hind’s pride at one-upping King George V. He damned Hind even more by implying Hind did not understand the differences between similar stamps in his own collection—differences that mattered to collectors.

  Hind did not care. The author Alvin F. Harlow described him as “headstrong” and a reckless buyer, and the philatelic historian Stanley M. Bierman called him “opinionated, cynical and strong-minded.” For his part, Hind could bristle with arrogance, as was apparent in an article he wrote for the catalogue of an international exhibition in Australia: “The unfortunate side of being prominent in stamps is that so many of the correspondents who have no knowledge whatsoever about stamps or their value, must be disappointed when not receiving replies to their simple but ignorant questions.”

  Some philatelists disdained Hind for buying, some for buying indiscriminately, like Ferrary. But the Ferrary of America was no Ferrary. Hind was more like William P. Brown, a New York coin dealer who began trading stamps around 1860, when philately was beginning to catch on with the public. “[A]s [Brown] had no knowledge of market values or rarity[,] he was guided by instinct,” L.N. and Maurice Williams wrote. The stamps Brown felt were worth featuring in his shop “he fixed onto the boards alongside his coins—with the nail through the middle of each stamp!”

  Hind did not nail his stamps in place, and he did not nail cash to the wall for dealers, the way Ferrary did. But neither did he assemble his collections patiently, one important stamp at a time. Like Ferrary, he snapped up whole collections that others had put together. He shelled out $15,000 for a complete collection of Hawaii and $63,000 for a highly regarded collection of France. Shortly before he bought the one-cent magenta, he spent $50,000 to acquire the one- and two-penny Mauritius stamps.

  Hind glued many of his stamps in stamp albums, all but ruining them forever. Some stamps he affixed to the pages with adhesive bandages. A deep student of philately would have known better than to risk damage to the stamps, but as the prestigious London Philatelist curtly observed, “We do not think Mr. Hind ever claimed to be a deep student of philately.” Hind simply plunged in, for he had so much to glue down. By the time Hugo Griebert pocketed the one-cent magenta for him at the Ferrary sale, Hind owned three or four of the world’s most valuable stamps, including a second pair of the famed Mauritius— the so-called Bordeaux Cover. It bore the orange one-penny and the blue two-pence Post Office Mauritius stamps and was described by the French dealer Roger Calves as “la pièce de resistance de toute la philatélie.”

  Even A.J. Sefi, a famous British stamp dealer who was friendly with Hind, seemed to damn Hind with faint praise. Sefi—a distant cousin of Michael Sefi, the keeper of the queen’s collection whom Redden visited in 2014— maintained that Hind paid too much for the Mauritius cover. A.J. Sefi said he and Percival Loines Pemberton (the son of Edward Loines Pemberton, who had not been fast enough with his check in 1878) had gone to Paris to buy it months before Hind did. Sefi said they decided not to go through with the deal because the price was too high and one of the stamps showed some slight damage.

  Sefi went on to indict Hind’s approach to collecting, faulting Hind for remaining an across-the-board generalist rather than limiting himself to stamps from only one or two places. “Collecting, as he did, the whole world,” Sefi wrote in The Philatelic Journal of Great Britain, “it was impossible for him to devote the hours of study to any one particular country that would have been possible had he been a ‘one-country’ man, as are so many of our great philatelists.” Sefi did defend Hind against criticism that he was “a wealthy man just accumulating vast quantities of the rarest obtainable stamps for the pure joy of possession … Hind was a much more knowledgeable buyer than the world gave him credit for,” Sefi wrote, and he “took the greatest interest and care in every one of his purchases.”

  Sefi knew Hind’s habits because he had visited Hind in Utica. “Wrapped in a voluminous dressing-gown,” Sefi wrote, “he would spend the entire day in his simple study, working upon his collection, the whole of which was immediately available a few steps away, in the strong room built into the wall just before where he sat.” Hind put in long hours: “I remember one day that we never left the room from nine thirty in the morning until tea time, lunch, as was his wont, consisting of a few sandwiches as we worked.”

  The one-cent magenta escaped the glue and the adhesive tape because Hind kept it in a cellophane envelope— and at least once, he forgot where he had stashed the envelope.

  Hind was unusual among philatelists: he came to it late in life. He had not collected stamps as a boy. There wasn’t time. A seventh-grade dropout, he had gone to work young. He went on to make a fortune in imitation furs and seat covers for automobiles, but he was a hardly a conventional capitalist. From his late forties on, he spent much of his time traveling the world and living large, “a thrifty, hard-headed, meticulous although sometime vacation-minded businessman,” as one New York historian remembered him. Hind was known to send telegrams to his home office outside Utica with disarmingly relaxed-sounding accounts of what he was up to: “Might do some business in Calcutta. Things dull in Johannesburg.”

  His fortune soared, thanks to a straightforward formula: always be the low-cost producer, even in bad times. But his was not the Horatio Alger story it appeared to be. The mill in Yorkshire in which he started out belonged to his family; he quit school because business had soured and he was needed at the mill. He worked his way up from the factory floor, and by the time he was seventeen, he was the firm’s rainmaker, bringing in new business.

  Hind moved to the United States in 1890, the year he turned 34, because of protectionist tariffs. Republicans had championed such tariffs since the Civil War. The latest round carried the name of William McKinley, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a Republican congressman from Ohio, the state where Firestone, Goodrich, and Rockefeller had gotten their starts. In Washington, as one biographer noted, McKinley was more often a mediator than a gladiator, and he assumed that the most punishing tariffs in his bill would be reduced by a House-Senate conference committee. The committee let them stand. Hardline protectionism eventually boomeranged on the Republicans, but if McKinley was oblivious to the connection between tariffs and the accumulation of wealth in the Gilded Age, Hind was not. From across the Atlantic, he had seen possibilities. Congress might make laws abridging the rights of foreign firms to profit from their exports, but Congress would never impose limits on American manufacturers. So Hind set out to become an American manufacturer.

  He did it the way he would later make himself a stamp collector. He bought his way in.

  He decided to move the family company’s “plush” division—the unit that made velvet-like fabric from worsted yarn—to the United States, machinery, workers and all. The only thing he needed was a mill. With his checkbook in his pocket, Hind and H.B. Harrison, who handled the finishing and dyeing of Hind’s fabrics in England, went shopping.

  Together they placed advertisements in newspapers and scouted failing factories that had “for sale” signs out. He and Harrison went as far as Hudson, New York, once a booming port city that later became infamous as “the little town with the big red-light district.” There they negotiated for a building they thought would do. But before the contract had been drawn up, Hind and Harrison decided to go sightseeing—specifically, to Niagara Falls— and before they departed, the one and only reply to their “factory wanted” advertisements reached them. It was from Clark Mills, New York, “a place,” in the words of the stamp dealer Charles J. Phillips, “they would never have considered if they had not planned this trip” to Niagara Falls. They put Clark Mills on the itinerary as the first stop. Phillips did not say whether they made it to Niagara Falls.

  Hind liked the empty factory building in Clark Mills, a “virtual ghost town” where hard
times had left “vacant houses pockmarked with broken windows.” He wanted the deal done fast. He stayed up all night in his hotel room, poring over documents that had to be signed to make the mill theirs. Then he sailed back to England to export the company, returning a few months later on the SS Majestic with five employees, the first of hundreds he brought over.

  Clark Mills immediately became a company town, but the Boss complained that there was too little to do there after the closing whistle had sounded in the afternoon. He heard the call of the city—not the big city but the one nine miles away, Utica, the one that the historian Edmund Morris described as little more than a “shabby canal town.” Hind took his money there, eventually purchasing a hotel and a parking garage. He also picked up a stake in a golf course that was soon rechristened “Arhipaca.” People wondered if it was an Indian name. It was not. It was the first two letters of his first and last name and the first two letters of the first and last names of Hind’s partner in the deal, Patrick Casey.

  By Utica’s standards, Hind was fabulously rich and, according to the stamp historian Bierman, “never took much advice.” But he took Harrison’s advice when Harrison urged him to take up the pursuits of the rich. It was Harrison who persuaded him to try philately.

  Harrison had heard that a collection was available right there in Utica. Hind snapped it up and thus became the owner of twelve thousand stamps. The collection had belonged to a doctor, presumably a pillar of the community in Utica, something Hind aspired to be. “Despite his great wealth,” Bierman wrote, “he seemed basically insecure, and overcompensated for his presumed shortcomings by grandiose acquisitions as if to justify his raison d’être.”

  Hind’s insecurity was on display almost as soon as he completed his most grandiose acquisition. Less than a year after Hind brought the one-cent magenta to the United States following the Ferrary sale, he carried it back to Europe. The occasion was a stamp exhibition in London in 1923. It was probably the first and only time the stamp was seen by the philatelist-king, George V. Sir Edward Denny Bacon, the king’s secretary for stamps, reported that George “didn’t want a cripple in his collection,” meaning the stamp held no appeal because of its cut corners. Sir John Wilson echoed that idea in his history of the royal stamp collection: “While [George V] acknowledged its interest and rarity, he regarded it as too poor a specimen to be worth anything like the figure which it [had] realized” in the Ferrary sale.

  But when Hind and about a hundred other philatelists called at Buckingham Palace, Hind “repeatedly pointed out to his gracious host”—the king—“that his own collection was superior in rarities to the Royal Collection,” Bierman wrote. “When shown the king’s Post Office Mauritius, Hind was quick to mention that he had a better set.” Still, the king accepted one of Hind’s cards with the image of the one-cent magenta.

  Hind was no more diplomatic on a trip to the Collectors Club in Manhattan in 1923. The club’s magazine reported that the scheduled events—a dinner at a fancy hotel and a talk by Hind, who had promised to show part of his collection—broke the club’s attendance records and brought together “a veritable Who’s Who among the leading United States specialists.” The Collectors Club counted among its members most of the boldface names of philately, including the dealer and auctioneer J.C. Morgenthau, who had sold Hind some of his Mauritius holdings, and Theodore E. Steinway, the son of one of the sons in Steinway & Sons, the piano company.

  But Hind said not one word at his “talk.” The club’s magazine played the apologist. “The fact is that it was hardly necessary for Mr. Hind to do any talking,” it said. “His stamps were there to speak for themselves.”

  He pulled three albums from a satchel. One was filled with Confederate stamps.

  The collectors took issue, however politely, with Hind’s glued-down, adhesive-bound stamp albums. The magazine wrote “the mounting is not terribly attractive.” But “this is only a temporary condition, as Mr. Hind is shortly to have the collections remounted in better albums.”

  Thanksgiving Day 1926 should have been the happiest of days for Hind, who had turned seventy earlier in the year. It was the day he married Ann Leeta McMahon. She wore a dress made of dark-green velvet—no doubt the finest that Hind’s mill could produce—and carried an orchid. The small bungalow in which the ceremony was held was decorated with chrysanthemums and lilacs. The Reverend Philip Smead Bird, a Presbyterian minister, officiated.

  The newspapers did not mention some intriguing details. One was that the groom had an affectionate nickname for the bride—Bob, although when I ran across a mention of “Bob” in a surrogate court file, I wondered if the judge or the stenographer had misunderstood something gruffer and more colloquial, like “Bub.” Another detail was whether the ceremony was a sham. The couple had been living together for years, sometimes traveling as husband and wife. On a passport application she filled out in 1925, she wrote that she had married Hind two years before.

  Ann was the daughter of a harness maker who went to work in a textile mill—not Hind’s—as the horse-and-buggy days disappeared in rear-view mirrors. It is not clear how she met Hind. David Redden’s first question to me, in a conversation months after the auction of the one-cent magenta and after I had begun reading up on Hind, was unrestrained: was she a showgirl? If she was, that occupation did not appear in census records. One listed her as an attendant in a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York when she was in her early twenties, some years before she took up with Hind.

  “She was the girl he escorted around town,” Richard L. Williams, the current historian for the Town of Kirkland, New York—which now includes Clark Mills— told me. But for years Hind had escorted her far beyond Utica. She had signed a second passport application in 1925 “Leeta Ann Hind” (and had written that her stops on an upcoming trip would include “Maderia, France,” suggesting that spelling and geography were not strengths). It was the same name she had used ten years before, when they boarded the SS Cartago for the trip through the Panama Canal and on to New Orleans. She was Mrs. Hind again when they boarded a ship in Yokohama, Japan, in 1917. The passenger manifest listed her as married; her name appeared below Hind’s, and he paid for more than her ticket. Along the way, Hind bought her a strand of pearls that year for $15,000 (equivalent to $278,000 in today’s dollars). When they were sold at an auction in the 1940s, one bidder said, “He was a better philatelist than he was a jeweler.”

  She registered as Leeta A. Hind in 1918, when they sailed from New York to San Juan on the SS Brazos, promoted by its owners as “specially built for tropical travel.” Again, she affirmed that they were married. But in 1919 in Liverpool, in the country whose citizenship Hind had renounced after moving to Clark Mills, she boarded the SS Carmania as Leeta A. McMahon, using her first husband’s name. She was Passenger No. 25, several lines below Hind in alphabetical order on the manifest, but still listed herself as McMahon’s widow on a passport application.

  Through all of this, Hind worked on his stamps, but his interest in philately faded after they finally married. He said there was nothing more to collect. In 1928, when the stock market was roaring, he put a part of his collection on the market, but not the one-cent magenta. He wanted half a million dollars for much of the collection ($6.9 million in today’s dollars). He turned down an offer for $480,000.

  Hind’s timing was terrible, but before long, he had things on his mind other than stocks and bonds that were worthless after the crash. By their fourth official anniversary—Thanksgiving in 1930—he apparently had had it with Ann. He more or less disinherited her for what he said were infidelities. He never got around to divorcing her, but he did revise his will. He left her their house, and in nine lines of tiny type, listed the possessions she was to have after he was gone, from jewelry and clothes to furniture, silverware, and “bric-brac.” He also spelled out what she was not to have: “My stamp collection.” It was “expressly excluded.”

  Leaving her the “dwelling” was generous of Hind
. The little bungalow had been hers to begin with, from her first marriage. But there was one possession that she was determined to have, willed or not.

  EIGHT

  $40,000

  1940: The Angry Widow, Macy’s, and the Other Plutocrat

  Arthur Hind died in March 1933 believing the one-cent magenta was in a vault at his bank in Utica. He had moved his stamp collection there several years before—most of it, anyway. But his executors, officials of the very same bank, did not find the one-cent magenta when they conducted an inventory. They searched frantically, checking and rechecking the albums and envelopes in the vault. Finally they turned their attention to the bungalow he and Mrs. Hind had shared. There, in Hind’s fireproof safe or in a drawer of his desk, was the stamp. It had been sent back from a stamp exhibition in late 1932, while Hind was still alive, and was still in the registered-mail envelope in which it had been returned. Apparently Hind had forgotten to forward it to the bank.

  Of course Mrs. Hind claimed it. It was her lottery ticket, if she could just cash it in.

  To do that, Mrs. Hind, the one person Hind did not want to have the one-cent magenta, would have to do the one thing that was not possible in the 1930s: sell it.

  Hind had tried and failed to sell some of his stamp holdings. In 1931, a disastrous year that began with the Dow Jones industrial average at 169 and ended with the Dow at 74, Hind showed his contrarian side, or perhaps his delusional side. He raised the price from $500,000 to $600,000. There were no takers.

  Mrs. Hind did not have the whole collection to sell. She did not have her husband’s Post Office Mauritius stamps, his Inverted Jennies, or his Confederates, and she did not demand them. She could really go after only one stamp, the one found in her home. It just happened to be the most valuable single item her husband had owned, the one-cent magenta.