Are you any good at spotting the odd ‘one’ out? What if there was a sheet of 100 stamps, all the same colour and design, and exactly the same appearance, except for one which has a couple of very subtle differences, do you think you’d notice?
You might well spot it if you knew you were looking for it. However, if you weren’t expecting there to be an odd one, and looking at the sheet of 100 stamps was routine and familiar and there wasn’t any hint or advance warning that there might be an erroneous ‘one’ among the other 99, I dare say we all might miss it.
I wonder if that explains why there is only ‘one’ Treskilling Yellow?
Now, as you might expect, there’s been quite a bit written about ‘The Treskilling Yellow’ which, would you believe, is now a registered trade name. In philatelic circles it is also known as the ‘Swedish 1857 3 skilling banco error of color’. It should be a ‘green’ stamp, but it’s yellow, and more importantly this error of colour is the only known example. Odd that, don’t you think?
There are several books published about this ‘one’ stamp, including a 2004 book titled, imaginatively; “The Treskilling Yellow”, with 185 pages. It’s a fascinating read. In addition there have been literally thousands of articles put into print in magazines and even national newspapers, and even today someone is writing about it.
And rightly so, because until 2014, when the British Guiana one cent magenta sold for $9.5m, it was the world’s most expensive stamp, and as such holds several world records starting as far back as 1984 when it was sold by international auctioneers David Feldman SA for 997’500 Swiss Francs. Back then that was an enormous sum of money, and no one could imagine a stamp going for that sort of price at the time. But, in 1990 it broke it’s own world record, when it was sold at another David Feldman SA rarity auction for 1’897’500 Swiss Francs – double what it had achieved just six years previous. And that’s not the end of the record breaking because this world record was broken again when it was sold by ‘another’ David Feldman SA auction in 1996 for a whopping 2’875’000 Swiss Francs. A philatelic Trinity of World Records!
I appreciate that’s a lot of records and even more Swiss Francs, but it does demonstrate the point that in just over a decade the little yellow stamp pulled in 5’750’000 of them. That’s big bucks for something that only weighs 0.02675 grams, and apparently means it is worth about 32 billion USD per pound. That is quite simply mind blowing. A humble stamp worth more than diamonds by weight.
However, being critical, the condition of this stamp isn’t sparkling, it has a cut in the upper left side, and the top margin has been reperfed at some stage. But it’s the rarity that gives this stamp its elevated position among the World’s most expensive stamps. It’s the ‘only one in the world!”
So the question is, why is there only one? And this question has been asked over and over again since it’s discovery in 1885 by Georg Bachman, a Swedish 14 year old schoolboy who sold it to a stamp dealer Heinrich Lichenstein for just 7 Swedish Kronor.
The fact that it is the only ‘one’ has caused controversy, and at times resulted in experts claiming it must be a forgery. But we don’t need to worry about that because not only has it been demonstrated in a court of law, back in 1932 that it is genuine, in 1975 scientists and ‘other’ experts confirmed it is genuine too, even employing ‘crystallography’ to prove that it was printed on the same paper used for the 1857 8 skilling yellow, but also that the ink is an exact match as well.
And given that its past owners, to name but two, have ranged from Count Ferrary – one of the worlds greatest stamp collectors who acquired it in 1894, and a fully fledged King – King Carol II of Romanian, who was a keen philatelist and purchased it in 1937, we don’t need to discuss its provenance – it’s gleaming with gemstone collectors. Today, it belongs to a Swedish billionaire, Count Gustaf Douglas a Swedish aristocrat and politician, who purchased it in 2010 but the price remains a secret.
So, why is this stamp printed in yellow instead of green and how can there be only one? As you probably guessed from my intro, whether a 3 skilling green or an 8 skilling yellow, they were all printed in sheets of 100. The printing plates were laid down by hand in a 10 by 10 formation and each stamp was a single impression of an individual block placed into a frame – each stamp on the sheet was reliant upon the correct value block being placed, by human hand, into the printing frame.
If when assembling the 8 skilling plate for printing, one single 3 skilling block is erroneously placed among the other ninety nine 8 skilling blocks and nobody noticed, then the sheet would have been printed with just one 3 skilling yellow amongst the other correctly printed ninety nine 8 skilling yellows. Assuming that the person responsible for quality control, who checked the sheet prior to sending to the post office also missed the error, and then the postmaster, who sold the 8 skilling stamp, didn’t realise it actually had 3 skilling imprinted, then we have an explanation as to how it happened, and crucially ‘why’ there is only ‘one’ surviving example.
Because if there was say a sheet of these 3 skilling stamps printed in yellow instead of green or even several erroneous blocks positioned on the sheet, then you’d expect there to be more than one example out there, and in truth you’d anticipate that if there was a sheet the quality control would have spotted it, and thus rejected the sheet, and if there were more than one erroneous block then the odds of spotting the mistake increased. But it would mean that ‘only’ one sheet was printed. That’s an odd assumption, but one we have to run with and accept this stamp is ‘an error of colour’, and the only way that an error of this type could have occurred resulting in there only being ‘one’.
Mind you, there was a lawsuit in 2012 brought to the high court in London no less, by a Baron Jean-Claude Andre claiming that he had stored a locked trunk at the Clydesdale bank vault in which allegedly there were six covers bearing a total of nine Treskilling Yellow stamps, and when he went to retrieve these valuable covers they were missing from his trunk. The case was thrown out. And maybe it was thrown out because of the logic we’ve just applied to there being only ‘one’ recorded copy of the Treskilling Yellow, and also because if those covers were stolen sometime before 2012, surely another example of this stamp would have surfaced by now? Wouldn’t it?
Ummm. If another example does mysteriously appear, then maybe Baron Andre was telling the truth, in which case we’ll have to rewrite our hypothesis. But more importantly, it would rewrite history, and whilst as a philatelist that’s exciting, I suspect that wouldn’t be such good news for Count Gustav Douglas; would it?
You see, as ‘odd’ as it might seem, the value of ‘The Treskilling Yellow’ is down to ‘one’ reason. It is the only ‘one’.
Note:
This image appeared in the 2004 book referred to above called The Treskilling Yellow by Lars Fimmerstaf. The Artist Leif Eriksson recreated the original sheet with yellow 8 skilling stamps and a single erroneous three skilling. Where is the 3 skilling? Not easy to spot, and it wouldn’t have been for the postal worker back in 1857, in the poor light and conditions likely to be incumbent back then. So is this the reason why The Treskilling Yellow is the only one?
Can recommend the book too, it’s written by Lars Fimmerstad, published by Argumentor “ The Treskilling Yellow”. It has many interesting threads, covers the controversy and all the tests and expert opinion, and lots of background, it is an enjoyable read.