One-cent Magenta : Inside the Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World
by Barron, James







One Stamp World
1(17)
Two Travels with David
18(31)
Three One Cent
1856: Printed, Sold, and Forgotten
49(13)
Four Six Shillings
1873: Found by a Twelve-Year-Old
62(25)
Five £120
1878: Glasgow and London
87(13)
Six £150
1878: The Man in the Yachting Cap
100(19)
Seven $32,500
1922: The Plutocrat with the Cigar
119(20)
Eight $40,000
1940: The Angry Widow, Macy's, and the Other Plutocrat
139(21)
Nine $286,000
1970: The Wilkes-Barre Eight
160(27)
Ten $935,000
1980: "The Man Showed Up"
187(31)
Eleven $9.5 Million
2014: "I Expected to See Magenta, and I Saw Magenta"
218(25)
Acknowledgments243(4)
Notes247


"When it was issued in 1856, it cost a penny. In 2014, this tiny square of faded red paper sold at Sotheby's for nearly $9.5 million, the largest amount ever paid for a postage stamp at auction. Through the stories of the eccentric characters who have bought, owned, and sold the one-cent magenta in the years in between, James Barron delivers a fascinating tale of global history and immense wealth, and of the human desire to collect"-





James Barron is a reporter for the New York Times, where his writing has appeared in virtually every section of the paper. He is the author of Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand, and he also edited The New York Times Book of New York. He and his wife live in New York City.





In 1856 in British Guiana, the postmaster was running low on stamps from Great Britain. Not confident that a ship from London would arrive before delivery of the mail was disrupted, he contracted with a local newspaper publisher to print provisional one-cent and four-cent stamps on his basic hand-set press. Only one of the small one-cent stamps survived a decade, and this slightly tattered bit of paper was proclaimed the world's rarest stamp by the early twentieth century. Since achieving this fame, the one-cent magenta has attracted a peculiar group of men and women who have paid dearly to acquire it. Because of its high value, it was subjected to numerous scientific tests to confirm its authenticity, on which not all the experts agreed. In his second book, New York Times reporter Barron (Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand, 2006) chronicles the international journey of an unlikely treasure. This delightful short book is a good bet for readers of nonfiction, especially those who enjoy microhistories. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews.





The biography of a very special stamp.The "Mona Lisa of stamps" was born-or printed-in British Guiana in 1856. As a mere, "provisional" one-cent stamp used to send out several hundred periodicals before the real stamps arrived by ship, its birth was unheralded. It was, as New York Times reporter Barron (Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand, 2006) notes, "overlooked and forgotten." The author first heard about the unique stamp at a party, and when he was told how much it might soon fetch at auction as part of the John E. DuPont estate, he had to know more. Barron turns this seemingly insignificant story into a thoroughly entertaining tale of speculation and investigation into "Stamp World, an arcane parallel universe peopled by collectors who are crazed and crazy, obsessed and obsessive." The first stop in the journey is 1873, when a 12-year-old boy found the stamp in his uncle's house and sold it to a novice collector for six shillings, the equivalent of "$16.83 in today's dollars." The stamp was soon sold to another collector, who then sold it to an eccentric Paris aristocrat and collector. When his entire collection was auctioned off in the early 1920s, the stamp was cataloged as "the only known example." Then, it was purchased by an anonymous, wealthy buyer, Arthur Hind, from Utica, New York for $32,500. Barron recounts the perhaps apocryphal story that Hind was approached by a man who claimed that he also had a one-center. According to the tale, Hind bought it and then burned it up with his cigar, saying, mischievously, "there's only one magenta one-cent Guiana." The author whimsically follows the stamp's long journey right up to where his story began: the record-breaking auction. A scintillating foray into "what makes something collectible, valuable, and enduring." Copyright Kirkus 2016 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.






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