The world’s most valuable stamp has long been considered the famed 1856 British Guiana one-cent magenta, an octagonal stamp with corners missing and postmarked “Demerara April 4, 1856.” No report of a second copy has ever been verified. This stamp sold for $935,000 at a New York auction in 1980, then the highest price ever paid for a single philatelic item in a public sale.
Among the most renowned of all U.S. philatelic material was a sheet of 100 bicolored 24-cent airmails, issued in 1918. The stamps feature as their central figure a picture of the Curtiss JN-4 biplane (commonly referred to as the Jenny), the aircraft designated for mail-carrying service, with the Jenny inadvertently printed upside down. Only one single sheet of the inverted centers has ever been found. After it was purchased in the 1920s, the stamps were separated into various singles, pairs, and blocks. The 24-cent Jenny invert has escalated steadily in value. In 1989 a block of four was sold at auction for $1 million.
Other famous, rare, or otherwise interesting stamps include the 1851 Baden 9 Kreuzer Blue Green stamp, the 1849 Bavarian 1 Kreuzer Black tête-bêche (two adjoining stamps printed upside down relative to each other), the 1851 Canada 12-pence Black (issued before Canada adopted the dollar as its unit of currency), the 1925 Honduras “Black” Airmail, the 1855 Sweden 3 Skilling-Banco (printed orange instead of green by mistake), and the 1851 Hawaiian “Missionaries”—2-cent, 5-cent, and 13-cent stamps so named because they were often used by American missionaries in Hawaii for correspondence sent back to the U.S. mainland.
