They say that if you want to discover real beauty you have to look beyond the appearance and delve beneath the surface. Well, this multi-million US$ stamp certainly provides a lesson in not judging a stamp by its looks…….find out what makes it so very beautiful and crucially valuable.
Now hear this correctly, because it doesn’t mean this stamp is ugly, but it isn’t eye candy, is it? Which is interesting being a coveted USA stamp, because many American philatelists put a premium on aesthetically pleasing items and some even refuse to buy a stamp if it doesn’t meet the good-looks criteria. Mind you this one does feature Benjamin Franklin (1705 to 1790), who is one of the founding fathers of the USA, and quite aptly he was the original Postmaster General of the postal system which today is the United States Post Office. But the key thing here has nothing to do with how handsome or how romantic the stamp might be. This 1868 1 cent blue Benjamin Franklin Z.Grill, is the one example of this stamp in private hands. The only other recorded used copy is safely tucked away in the USA National Postal Museum, part of the Benjamin K. Miller Collection, so if you want to complete a 19th century collection of United States issues you are going to have to swallow the candy criteria and cough up an eye watering amount of money.
This stamp sold in 1998 for $935,000 to the Mystic Stamp Company, a stamp dealer, who in 2005, swapped it for the Unique 1918 24c Inverted Jenny Plate Block, that had been purchased by one of the greatest modern day philatelists William Gross for $2’970’000. Gross is best known as an investor, fund manager, and philanthropist, and is also renowned in the world of stamps for becoming only the third person, after Robert Zoellner in the 1990s and Benjamin K. Miller in 1920s, to form a complete collection of 19th century United States postage stamps. A feat that was only achieved once the swap deal was done. The Inverted Jenny Unique Block swiftly went into the collection of Stuart Weitzman, who is selling it in June 2021, along with the British Guiana 1 cent Magenta, and a rare US coin. Now when Gross sold ‘part’ of his collection in 2018, the USA bit broke a world record for the most achieved in a single auction – the sale generated $10 million, breaking the $9.1 million record for a single-day stamp auction set in 2007. The icing on this particular saccharine story is that Gross donated the proceeds to Médecins Sans Frontières – Doctors Without Borders. Bill Gross is as generous as he is philatelically thorough. He filled every USA stamp gap and he fully stocked the charity coffers to overfilling. And putting a touch of glacé on this tale, prior to his 2018 sales of US, Gross auctioned his Great Britain, British Commonwealth, Western Europe, Scandinavia, Confederate States, Switzerland and Hawaii stamp collections which generated more than $26 million in sales. You get the impression that there is nothing subtle here about Bill Gross and his passion for the hobby of stamp collecting, which again is at odds with our postmaster’s stamp. Like the expression beauty is only skin deep, or in plain terms, a pleasing appearance is not a guide to worth, it’s sort of poetic in a way because this here featured 1868 1c Benjamin Franklin stamp’s value is precisely that. Only skin deep. It doesn’t look very much does it? You see, or in reality you can’t because its outward appearance gives no indication of its attractiveness. To identify it from the very common version of this issue, you have to spot the tiny indentation in the paper which is the so-called “Z” variety of a grill that has been pressed into the stamp.
It’s beautiful really don’t you think.