Jenny
Invert
Though
the stamp that turned up on a Broward County, Florida, absentee
ballot Nov. 7 is believed to be a forgery that has been in
circulation since the 1990s, several authentic examples of
the best-known United States error are unaccounted for and
have been for years. Some of these simply may have entered
a collection years ago and have resided there since, perhaps
never changing hands, or deeded directly from one generation
of collector to another. Nevertheless, news of their current
whereabouts would be welcome news indeed to those with an interest
in U.S. stamps.
Because
they originally came from a single unique sheet of 100, all
the Jenny inverts are identified by their positions in that
original 10-by-10-stamp sheet, from position 1 in the top-left
corner to position 100 in the bottom-right corner.
Best known of these missing Jenny inverts are two of the rare
air mail errors from a block of four that was stolen on September
23, 1955, while on display at an America Philatelic Society convention
in Norfolk, Va. The owner of the block at the time of the theft
was Mrs. Ethel B. McCoy of New York City, who later assigned
her interest in the stamps to the American Philatelic Research
Center (APRL).
The
stolen block was separated, and two single stamps taken from
it were recovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in
the Chicago area, one in 1977 (position 75) and the second
in 1982 (position 65). The FBI praised the work and cooperation
of the American Philatelic Society Stamp Theft Committee, which
provided much of the information that led to the recovery of
the latter stamp. But the other two stolen stamps --- positions
66 and 76, presumably also separated into singles, and now belonging
to the APRL --- have never been accounted for, and are believed
to reside in collections, today’s owners perhaps unaware
that they are loot from a crime that took place more than 50
years ago.
As documented by George Amick in his 1986 book Jenny!,
another of the inverts (position 18) was among the rarities in
the Benjamin K. Miller collection stolen on May 9, 1977, while
on display at the New York Public Library. It, along with many
of the other stolen stamps, was recovered in the early 1980s
from the estate of a New York stamp dealer.
In the exhaustive appendix to Jenny!, George Amick
did a fine detective job in tracking down the sales histories
of many of these valuable U.S. errors up to the 1980s. Even so,
despite exhaustive research, he was unable when the book was
published in 1986 to find records for inverts from positions
13, 32, 49, 79 and 99.
The invert on the November 2006 absentee ballot envelope may
be bogus, but ample proof exists that very bad things can happen
to very good stamps. In 1989, a tragic tale told by Michael Laurence
in Linn’s Stamp News. An extremely fine Jenny
invert (position 78) — ironically, the very one used on
the front cover of Amick’s best-selling book on these errors — fell
unnoticed from the album of its owner and was found later in
the bag of the vacuum cleaner that had sucked it up and mangled
it. Repaired as best it could be, it was resold at a loss of
more than $50,000 from the original $88,000 he’d paid for
it.
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