If I told you I’d be arriving in Bellefonte for Aerophilately 2022 in a red 1971 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona, you would, of course, assume that I’d mortgaged my soul or won the lottery. How else would I be able to come up with $2 million to buy the car of my dreams? “But wait,” you say. “Weren’t there more than 1300 of those sleek little beauties built? That’s hardly a rarity. Who would pay $2 million for such an item?” Quite a few well-heeled Ferrari enthusiasts, as it turns out. And in the world of philately, as in the world of collectible automobiles, price and scarcity are not always proportional. Desirability reigns as the wild card in determining how much we’ll pay for The Big One, the ultimate catch.
Often enough, The Big One is an item that has become fashionable, a stamp or cover that the philatelic community as a whole has deemed particularly desirable. And fashion (i.e. reputation) can play a major role in determining price. For example, we’d likely have to fork over more than $10 million for the one-of-a-kind 1856 British Guiana one-cent Magenta, a rather unassuming stamp that has developed a world-class reputation perhaps largely based on its uniqueness. By contrast, the Holy Grail of airmail collecting, the 24-cent Jenny invert, departed the post office on May 14, 1918, in the hands of William T. Robey, as a sheet of 100. Doing the math using the British Guiana as a base would suggest a value of about $100,000 for each Jenny invert, assuming none have gone out with yesterday’s trash. And yet, sheer desirability sets the price of a well-centered Jenny invert at about $1.5 million—roughly 15 times the expected value—on those rare occasions when one becomes available. So, once again, we’re talking Ferrari money for an item that’s just not all that scarce.
Could we, in any sense, hope to predict the effects of this nebulous quality called desirability on the average collector’s next auction bid or next visit to a dealer’s booth or site? If my experience is any guide, the answer is simply no. Most of the fun derives from the quest, after all, and each collector is free to identify his or her own Big One, with a dizzying array of factors weighing on that choice, not least of which is price. Admittedly, though, scarcity—the difficulty of even locating the object of one’s philatelic desire—is clearly a major factor. My search for a particularly elusive cover illustrates this point well.
No one seems to know for certain how much mail was carried in either direction in October of 1934 on the final transatlantic round trip of the Couzinet 70 Arc-en-ciel. For those of us who collect material flown by Air France between Europe and South America in the 1930s, locating covers carried on the outbound flight has posed quite a challenge. Several years ago, I sat down with the late Gérard Collot and asked whether anyone had located even a single piece of mail from this flight, designated 8A, that arrived in Brazil from the African coast on October 3, 1934. Pilot Jean Mermoz was at the flight controls and Henri Guillaumet was his co-pilot. Collot showed me photocopies of the three 8A covers in his collection, obtained over several decades of searching. Three covers! Good luck finding a fourth.
A standing eBay search for 1934 Air France material yielded nothing. Dealers shook their heads. I couldn’t get a shot at an 8A cover for love or money. Then, after years of frustration, an amazing cover posted in Paris on September 25, 1934, appeared (Figure 1).
Figure 1. A Paris to Montevideo, Uruguay cover, flown by Mermoz and Guillaumet on Air France flight 8A. Cachet indicates special provision for airmail flown at surface rate of 1fr50 (Scott 282) rather than 10fr.
The dealer clearly knew that there was something unusual involved with the franking and the rectangular cachet—airmail treatment at the surface mail rate. The opening bid was set at more than $100. I strongly suspected that this was an 8A cover even though the arrival backstamp was barely legible in the online scan. So I matched the opening bid and held my breath, fearing that someone would swoop in at the last second to claim my prize. No one did, but I was only halfway home.
When the cover arrived, I used Photoshop to darken a scan of the reverse so that my expert friends in France could better see what I regarded as a decisive receiving backstamp. Collot agreed that the faint arrival backstamp, applied at Montevideo, Uruguay, reads October 7. I finally had my first 8A cover.
A second 8A cover has recently come my way in a manner that illustrates an entirely different dimension to the aerophilatelic quest—the collector’s peculiar tastes and personal experience. Beyond scarcity or reputation, beyond the range of the hallowed Jenny invert, lies a realm where desirability depends very simply upon one’s unique individual experience. In this regard, the second 8A cover that I obtained possesses infinitely more meaning for me than the first. The two covers were flown on the same flight by the same iconic pilots. Moreover, the second one was obtained at a bargain price. And yet, to me, that cover is the one that is priceless.
Figure 2 illustrates the cover. The first key to its value, aside from the posting date of September 26, 1934, is that it originated in the country then known as Czechoslovakia.
Figure 2. Králové, Czechoslovakia, to Buenos Aires carried on flight 8A. The cover is franked with five 2-koruna airmail stamps (Scott C12), a single 4-koruna (Scott C14) and a single 1.50-koruna (Scott 110) postage stamp.
That country, later so torn by World War II, was the native land of a very special person in my life, Anna Berg, the mother of my best friend from elementary school, which we attended in Toledo. Anna had escaped from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia and married Bjarne Berg, who spent his working life on the ore freighters that plied the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway. Anna remained at home with us kids, providing a wonderful nurturing influence on our lives. I include myself as family, along with Tommy Berg and his sister Nancy, because their household was a safe haven for me, my own home having been a battleground due to my father’s drinking.
An 8A cover posted in Czechoslovakia in 1934 thus has meaning well beyond the mere fulfillment of the quest for a cover from that flight. It is a memento of a loving and nurturing woman, the incomparable Anna Berg.
In the broadest sense, of course, the idea of a philatelic quest suggests that we have a specific collecting goal: to fill a space in an album, to enhance an exhibit, or to obtain a really special and desirable item. But chasing down The Big One sometimes works in reverse. The Big One may appear out of nowhere to chase us down. Walk into a stamp show, my friend, and beware the philatelic ambush.
Figure 3 illustrates a cover of well-defined scarcity that, at first glance, I would never have considered desirable, Lindbergh autographs being well out of my price range. But then a friend pointed out that this one is unique, the only one of the nine covers carried on the budding airmail pilot’s April 10, 1926, test flight from Springfield to Chicago that is not franked with an airmail stamp. That might make it less desirable (and therefore easier to turn down) for the majority of aerophilatelists. But the franking, in this case, makes all the difference.
Figure 3. Carried (and signed) by Lindbergh on his “Air Mail Test Trip, Springfield-Chicago, April-10-1926.” One of nine carried, but the only one franked with a pair of Scott 621 rather than an airmail stamp.
I’d been chasing the 5-cent Norse American issue (Scott 621) on cover for quite some time when the Lindbergh autographed item was placed before me. A dealer once told me that the scarcity of covers bearing the dark blue and black stamp bearing an image of a Viking ship (Scott 621) derives from the fact that there are so many Americans of Norwegian descent, some of them philatelists, and a whole lot of them, apparently, willing to go to their graves hanging onto covers bearing this beautifully designed stamp.
Here, then, was a unique cover, not only signed and carried by America’s greatest aviator, but bearing a pair of my favorite stamp, a stamp devilishly difficult to find on cover. Even at that tantalizing level of desirability, however, the cover seemed out of reach: the price was simply out of my range, thanks to the Lindbergh autograph. Enter my loving wife. She pointed out that the item came from the collection of a late friend tragically and recently taken from us. We would, she pointed out, honor him by ignoring the price and acquiring the item. And so we did. The Big One had chased us down.
You might notice that I describe the Lindbergh cover with the pair of Norse American stamps as unique. That word is all-important when applied to the philatelic quest. A dealer who touts an item as unique clearly hopes to dazzle the collector with an enhanced sense of the item’s irresistibility. That enhancement, of course, extends to the price. Thus, the astute collector is best advised to see the word unique as something of a red flag, raising serious questions. “Just how unique is this item?” “Does the claim justify the price?”
In the case of the Lindbergh cover, uniqueness turned a previously unknown and unsought item into The Big One. When would I ever encounter such an important cover franked with the stamp that appeals to me so strongly? The answer, in that case, was never. But let me offer another example of apparent uniqueness that involves that elusive factor of desirability.
Once every two years, my wife and I travel to France, but the pandemic set those plans back to the point that our 2022 trip, this past May, was our first in four years. Thus, I was primed with a rather larger philatelic budget than usual as I embarked, in Paris, on my much-anticipated visit to the stamp shops in the vicinity of Rue Drouot. I first stopped in at a shop in the Passage des Panoramas, one of those impressive Paris arcades that have been beautifully restored over the past several years. There, I obtained a nice cover flown by Mermoz on flight 4A, a very desirable piece at a nice price. So far, so good. I still had several hundred euros to spend.
When I emerged from the arcade, I walked a couple blocks up Rue Drouot, then made a wrong turn in looking for a shop that I often visit. Being lost on the streets of Paris is by no means an unpleasant experience, and I decided to circumnavigate the block in a way that I was sure would allow me to approach my dealer destination from the opposite direction. Destiny took a hand, as Bogart says in a rather cheesy line in Casablanca, and I encountered a previously unknown stamp shop at No. 12 before reaching my intended goal at No. 8. At No. 12, I had the pleasure of looking through a huge album of Air France covers. And the siren song of uniqueness drew me to the most expensive item in the album.
The London office of Aéropostale (a precursor of Air France) had sent a number of “pli de temoin” (verification covers) on the first official mail flight across the South Atlantic, Mermoz’s flight 1A, in May 1930.
Gérard Collot had one of these covers in his collection franked with a block of four of the one-shilling George V stamp. But this one that I was beholding in the shop at No. 12 was franked with that stamp, plus a two-and-a-half pence George V, plus the half-a-crown value of the George V “Seahorse” stamp (Figure 4). Franked with a Seahorse! This was no run-of-the-mill 1A cover. This one was probably unique and certainly desirable in the n-th degree.
Figure 4. Pli de temoins (test cover) sent on May 9, 1930, from the Aéropostale office in London to Rio de Janeiro, and flown on flight 1A. Franked with one of Great Britain’s beautiful Seahorse stamps (the 2s6p Scott 179) along with Scott 163 and 172.
The dealer demonstrated that the cover contained an insert detailing the time of day that the item had been posted by the London office of Aéropostale. It was The Big One, no doubt about it. But could I bargain the man down from the exorbitant price to something merely painful? It was very fortunate that I had a Metro ticket in my pocket, since, after purchasing that beautiful 1A cover, I walked out of the shop without a single euro in my wallet.
If you’re beginning to see a pattern here tagging me as a dealer’s delight, a collector who has a way of talking himself into believing that the proffered item is, indeed, The Big One, I’m pretty sure you’re right. Our enthusiasms make us dangerously vulnerable. Even our heritage can betray us.
A close friend hails from Nancy, in eastern France, and his grandfather was an associate of the organizers of the first airmail flight in Europe, from Nancy to Lunéville in July 1912. Imagine the plight of my friend when he falls under the sway of a dealer who places before him a piece of material related to that flight (or the stamp printed up at that time to commemorate it). The Big One, my friends, lurks around every philatelic corner.
Picture me then, a few weeks ago, holding my own financially while reading through an auction catalog. I came upon an item flown by Imperial Airways on the August 1939 inaugural round trip between Great Britain and North America. Zero desirability. According to the auction house, two Bermuda covers are known from the westerly direction. The cover being offered was unlisted in the standard catalog and “probably unique” in being canceled upon arrival from New York (Figure 5) on the easterly return trip, presumably on a refueling stop. Bermuda happens to be my second-favorite place in the world (next to Paris), but, no, I told myself, I will summon up the strength to pass on this cover. And then I noticed the arrival cancellation.
Figure 5. Front and reverse of cover flown on Imperial Airways first regular service, Great Britain to U.S., canceled in Flatts (Smith’s parish) on August 10, 1939, after offloading from the return flight.
The cancellation was applied not in Hamilton or St. Georges, but in Flatts. Flatts! The home of the Bermuda Aquarium, where I have done such enjoyable volunteer work while on vacation. Flatts! Where I have performed concerts (dubbed “Animal Sing Songs”) for young people. Flatts! Where I have presented slide shows to the Bermuda Zoological Society. Could a man resist a cover touted as “probably unique” and canceled in Flatts? Not a chance.
May your quest for The Big One offer all of the same convoluted delights, wherever the chase might lead you. And may you have a few hundred euros in your pocket on the streets of whatever world capital you happen to be visiting when The Big One chases you down.
Resources
The National Postal Museum Exhibit on airmail pilots includes information on this phase of Lindbergh’s career at https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/fad-to-fundamental-airmail-in-america-airmail-pilot-stories-contract-pilots/charles
An excellent history of Bermuda aviation is Ewan Partridge and Tom Singfield’s Wings over Bermuda, published in 2014 by National Museum of Bermuda Press.
The standard catalog of covers related to French aviation in the Mermoz era is Gerard Collot and Alain Cornu’s Ligne Mermoz: Histoire aérophilatélique, Latécoère, Aéropostale, Air France, 1918-1940. Published in 1990 by Editions Bertrand Sinais, Paris.
The Author
Dan Gribbin began collecting seaplanes on stamps 50 years ago. He has ended up specializing in mail flown across the South Atlantic by Aéropostale/Air France, 1930-1940. Writing about (and speaking about) airmail is one of his favorite activities. As Vice President of the American Airmail Society, he is eagerly looking forward to the fellowship with collecting friends at Aerophilately 2022, where he will be, of course, chasing The Big One.
Endnote
[1] The flight designations for Aéropostale/Air France mail flights across the South Atlantic were established by Pierre Labrousse in his pamphlet Répertoire des Traversées Aériennes de l’Atlantique Sud par l’Aéropostale et Air-France, 1930-1940 (Libourne, France: Labrousse, 1974). Flight 8A is interesting for not having originated at Dakar (i.e. St. Louis), Senegal, but rather having followed the following itinerary: Villa Cisneros (Río de Oro) to Porto Praïa (Cape Verde) to Natal (Brazil).