INTRODUCTION

The British Guiana One-Cent Black on Magenta is the rarest and most famous stamp in the world. It is a superlative in the realms of collecting and in no other field is one single item so highly revered above all others. Its remarkable 165-year history is perhaps the greatest story in all philately, a tale involving the foremost collectors, dealers, and experts dating back to the very beginning of the hobby.
Printed on paper, the most readily disposable material of the past two thousand years, it was clipped, endorsed, then sent off, carrying the mail into the most inhospitable climate and thereby fulfilling its entire reason for being. By the slightest chance, the paper on which it rested was not discarded, whether for sentimental or business purposes we shall never know.
In the sweltering heat and humidity of the Colony weeks became months and months became years. The imprint and cancel like so many old newspapers slowly fading to gray; the face, an as yet unnamed deep red color, weather-beaten and worn yet still retaining its luster and contrast to the sharp black initials of the postal clerk’s quill.
Fate may still have condemned this tiny slip to oblivion were it not for an unlikely savior. The local boy who noticed the odd octagon while rummaging through the discarded papers of an old relative did not covet the strange looking imprint as he soaked it from its companion of seventeen years. Instead, the twelve-year-old eyes saw only the bright new stamps he could obtain by selling his “find” for a few shillings.
The new owner, barely out of his teens himself, recognized it as something special. Over the next five years he would see the philatelic world turn its gaze to the small South American colony. Shillings quickly became pounds and finally the temptation became too great. His collection, One-Cent and all, was dispatched to the heart of the Empire.
An enterprising young dealer from Liverpool named Thomas Ridpath recognized the opportunity and purchased the stamp on the spot. In a few short weeks it had crossed the English Channel to France and into the greatest collection of all time, that of the eccentric recluse Philipp von Ferrary.
Meanwhile, across the Channel, rumors began to swirl around a mythical One-Cent Magenta from British Guiana. At first the possibility of the stamp even existing was denied yet the rumors persisted. Finally, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Edward Bacon, the great English philatelist, was invited to Paris to see for himself. Nearly twenty years after being spotted by the young schoolboy, and with no others having come to light, the One-Cent Black on Magenta was declared to be the Rarest Stamp in the World.
Following the death of Ferrary the world gathered for the sale of his treasured possessions. Kings, captains of industry, and the great dealers of the time gathered for the sale in Paris in 1922. For the first time an image of the stamp appeared and the world at large had its first glimpse of the famed stamp. The successful buyer, a largely unknown American industrialist named Arthur Hind, paid over $32,500 and made headlines around the world.

Hind reveled in his newfound fame and for the first time allowed the stamp to travel to exhibitions around the world. Seven years after his death in 1933, his widow sold the stamp for $45,000 to a mysterious Australian businessman. In the fifties the stamp was further engraved into the public consciousness when featured in Life magazine.
Irwin Weinberg and a consortium made further history in 1970 when they purchased the British Guiana for $280,000, again shattering the record price for a postage stamp. The following decade saw Weinberg travel extensively, the stamp in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, with an ever-present armed guard.
When it returned to auction in New York in 1980, John du Pont, heir to the eponymous chemical fortune, raised the bar even further to $935,000 in front of a packed house at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The stamp became the centerpiece of a marvelous collection of its compatriots before its owner descended into madness, murder, prison, and finally death.

On June 17, 2014 famed shoe designer Stuart Weitzman purchased the British Guiana for $9,480,000 at Sotheby’s New York. For seven years he has graciously placed the stamp on public view for all to enjoy, and now it is returning to the same salesrooms for the next buyer to continue the story.
Described over a century ago as a ”queer” thing with a “rubbed” appearance, it is in all probability no different today than it was then. The slight disturbance to the still vibrant magenta surface is perhaps as much attributable to the climate of its country of origin than to any later interference. For the only truly verifiable difference one has to turn the stamp on its face and view the eight marks of its keepers for the past one hundred and forty-three years.
The purchaser will have the opportunity, if not the obligation, to add his or her name to this most elite club in all collecting history: Owners of the rarest and most valuable stamp in the world.
THE EARLY POSTAL HISTORY OF BRITISH GUIANA

Perched on the northeast shore of South America, the small colony that was to become British Guiana relied on passing ships as means of communication with the outside world. The first private mail service was established in 1796 yet it had proved slow and was constantly being disrupted.
A main post office had been operated at Georgetown since the eighteenth century, when the city was still named Stabroek. In 1813 a substation was opened in New Amsterdam, Berbice. Postmasters, appointed by the Dutch and British respectively, had come and gone with great frequency and had met with little success and even less respect. The few attempts that had been made to implement inland mail delivery were irregular, expensive, and short-lived. The only real purpose of the Postmaster and his office was to collect, sort, and dispatch the transatlantic mail. As this was the era before postage stamps and the prepayment of letters, the citizenry would have to go the Post Office and pay for their mail, which in turn paid the salary of the Postmaster. This system inevitably encouraged abuses but even after the British Admiralty assumed control of the Packet Service in 1823 the problems persisted.
The advent of steamships in 1840 created a faster and more reliable mail service to and from the Colony; however, regular inland mail was still a long way away.
E. T. E. DALTON, COLONIAL POSTMASTER
Between his appointment as Deputy Postmaster General in March 1837 and his retirement as Postmaster of the Colony in 1874, Edward Thomas Evans Dalton was notably more successful than his predecessors. Even so, he frequently faced discipline from the Colonial Office, which had little understanding of the exigencies of running a British post office in a remote colony.
The Georgetown Post Office was evidently something of a family sinecure. E. T. E. Dalton succeeded his father, Edward Henry Dalton, who had formerly been a sugar planter, and he was followed in turn by his own son, Edward Henry Goring Dalton. But it was Edward Thomas Dalton who achieved greatness in the postal realm: he introduced regular inland mail delivery to British Guiana and he provided the colony with some of the earliest postage stamps in the world.
On Saturday, 15 June 1850, an announcement appeared in the biweekly Royal Gazette, heralding a new daily inland service (Sundays excepted), which was coordinated with local train timetables, railways having been established in the colony in 1848. The notice provided a schedule of towns to be served, receiving offices, and postal rates, which varied according to distance: the minimum rate was 4 cents an ounce and the maximum rate was 12 cents an ounce, with an intermediate rate of 8 cents an ounce. British Guiana sought official permission to launch a local post, and approval was granted by London—but in true Demerara fashion, Dalton started the service three months before it was formally authorized.
BRITISH GUIANA’S FIRST POSTAGE STAMPS
THE COTTONREELS
(Stanley Gibbons nos. 2-8, Scott nos. 2-5)

The stamps that Dalton commissioned in 1850 were of a rudimentary design created using the limited resources of the offices of Joseph Baum and William Dallas, printers and publishers of the Royal Gazette of British Guiana, a small-format newspaper issued every Wednesday and Saturday in Georgetown. The Postmaster turned to local printers because the inland service was to begin before stamps could possibly be supplied from Great Britain.
An employee named Henry Mackay, according to Edward Chauncy Luard, the first prominent philatelist in British Guiana, printed the stamps produced in Baum and Dallas’s shop in 1850. They were circular, and in size and design so reminiscent of the labels found on the ends of spools of thread that they subsequently became known among collectors as “cottonreels.” To easily differentiate between the values the stamps were printed in black ink on different colored papers: the four-cent on orange (with a later printing on lemon-yellow); the eight-cent on green; and the twelve-cent on blue shades ranging from pale to indigo.
All examples of the 1850 cottonreels are initialed by Dalton or by one his subordinates: J. B. Smith, a clerk in the Imperial Branch; H. A. Killikelly, a letter carrier; W. H. Lorimer, likely a railway clerk; and Edmond Dalzell Wight, a clerk in the Colonial Post Office, whose E.D.W. appears on the 1856 One-Cent. The initialing is thought to have been done to thwart counterfeiters, since anyone with a job press and a handful of type could have produced a reasonable facsimile of the Royal Gazette stamps.
THE TWO-CENT COTTONREEL
(Stanley Gibbons no. 1, Scott no. 1)

Early in 1851, a fourth value was added to the issue of cottonreel stamps. A 2-cent denomination was printed to cover postal delivery within Georgetown. Postmaster Dalton again used a notice in the Royal Gazette, 22 February 1851, to introduce the new service: “By Order of His Excellency the Governor and upon the request of several of the merchants of Georgetown, it is proposed to establish a Delivery of Letters twice a day through the principal streets of this city, viz., Water-Street, Main-Street, their intermediate streets, and the Brick Dam, as far as the Roman Catholic Chapel. … Each letter must bear a stamp, for which Two Cents will be charged or it will not be delivered, and when called for will be subject to the usual postage of Eight Cents.” Deliveries began on March 1 and were set for 10:00 in the morning and 2:00 in the afternoon.
The 2-cent stamps were printed by Baum and Dallas on rose-colored paper using the same typographic frames as the three earlier values. All ten surviving examples are initialed—two by Dalton, two by Wight, and six by Smith—and given the emphasis in the announcement of the inter-Georgetown post that prepaid stamps were required for all letters, this is further circumstantial evidence that the purpose of the initialing was not to deter forgery but to certify good payment.
THE 1852 SECOND ISSUE
(Stanley Gibbons nos. 9 and 10, Scott nos. 6 and 7)

The new inland mail service of British Guiana was greeted with enthusiasm, but it ultimately proved to be unpopular because of the system of charging by distance. On 27 December 1851, Postmaster Dalton announced that in the New Year the colony’s Post Office was converting to a weight-based fee structure. Regardless of the distance of their delivery, letters weighing less than half an ounce would require four cents postage; less than an ounce eight cents, with every additional ounce requiring an additional four cents in postage. New stamps were also issued for 1852—the first to be supplied to the colony from the English mainland. They were produced by a firm of legal document printers, Waterlow and Sons Limited.
The large upright rectangular stamps came in two values and were printed by lithography: two copper dies were engraved for each value and impressions of these were made on paper and then transferred to a lithographic stone. The one-cent was printed in black on magenta surface-colored paper, the four-cent in black on deep blue. The error Patimus for Petimus in the colony’s motto (“we give and seek in return”) was the fault of the engraver in England. The stamps, although somewhat crudely printed, were far superior to the issues they replaced. They would stay in circulation for less than two years when they were superseded by the finely engraved Waterlow colored issue of 1853.
THE 1853 THIRD ISSUE
(Stanley Gibbons nos. 12–20, Scott nos. 8–11)
There was no official announcement for the new 1-cent and 4-cent stamps of 1853. As there was no change in the postage rate it seems likely that the new stamps—again printed by Waterlow—just replaced the old as they arrived in the Colony. For the first time both values were printed in color on white paper: the 1-cent in shades between vermilion and brown red, the 4-cent in light to deep blue. The upright rectangle now conformed to standard postage-stamp size. This would remain the standard type for the years 1853 to 1859—except for an extended period of 1856 when the Colony would be forced to produce its own stamps once again.
THE 1856 PROVISIONALS AND THE ONE-CENT BLACK ON MAGENTA
(Stanley Gibbons nos. 23-27, Scott nos 13-16)

In early 1856 the Post Office in British Guiana was about to run out of stamps due to a delay in supply—never satisfactorily explained—from the English printers Waterlow and Sons. Postmaster Edward Dalton had to look to a local supplier in order to avoid calamity, and, as in 1850, he approached the firm of Dallas and Baum. The publishers had in the interim changed the name of their newspaper to the Official Gazette, which more accurately reflected the periodical’s position as the authorized organ of the colonial government. In fact, since the 1856 stamps were produced by the official printer of the colony on the order of the colony’s Post Office, this issue should probably not be described as “provisional,” its traditional designation.
For this contingency supply of stamps, the Gazette office abandoned the simple circular cottonreel design and attempted to mimic the appearance of the first, 1852, Waterlow stamps. The printer, most likely Archibald Devonshire in this instance, took a stock wood- or metal-cut vignette of a ship and set it with the Colony motto Damus Petimus, above, Que Vicissum, below, all within a frame of four thin rules. At the upper and lower borders, outside the rules, he set the words BRITISH and GUIANA; at the left border, the word POSTAGE, and at the right, one of two duties: ONE CENT or FOUR CENTS.
The stamps were set and printed in pairs, one above the other. The top setting is known as type one and the bottom as type two. The small size of the form was almost certainly due to the small number of ship cuts available
The 4-cent stamps were printed in black on four basic papers: first magenta, next bright magenta, then surface-colored blue, and finally full blue. Throughout the year the printing was repeated as the papers changed, and several states are known. The single surviving One-Cent known is a type two, the lower of the pair, and falls between state I and II of the earliest printed 4-cent values on magenta surface paper. Judging by the earliest known cancellations, the One-Cent is almost certainly from February 1856.
The reason the two 1856 duties were initially printed on the same color paper remains a puzzle. Because of the celebrity of the One-Cent, the question has usually been phrased as to why the One-Cent was printed on the same color as the 4-cent. But the more pertinent question is why the 1856 4-cent was printed on red, since the 4-cent was consistently on blue for all other issues from 1852 through 1860. The answer probably lies in the supplies available to the printers. It does appear that when a blue ink, or a blue paper became available later in the year it was adopted for use. British Guiana always had several indigenous red dyes such as annatto or chica on hand.
The stamps were prepared at the Gazette offices in the Cumingsburg district, No. 23 High Street and Church Street. They were reputedly printed on a Columbian “Eagle” press manufactured by Thomas Long & Co., Engineers, Edinburgh, now housed at the National Museum of Guyana.
As with the previous locally produced issues of 1850, Postmaster Dalton had each stamp initialed by either himself or one of his clerks for extra security. The unique One-Cent was initialed by E(dmund) D(alzell) W(ight). Wight had little tolerance for the philatelic celebrity achieved by British Guiana’s early stamps. In 1889, Edward Denny Bacon, one of the first philatelists to write about the stamps of the colony, reported that E. C. Luard had told him that “Mr. Wight is still alive and living in the colony but he is in his dotage and either cannot or will not remember anything about these old stamps except that he initialed them. He has been so pestered on the subject that the mention of old stamps to him is like a red rag to a bull.”
1873-1878: FROM GEORGETOWN TO PARIS

On Murray Street in Georgetown in 1873, twelve-year-old Louis Vernon Vaughan was rummaging through the old letters of his uncle Andrew Hunter who had moved to Barbados the previous year. A newly minted stamp collector he began soaking the stamps from their covers and placing them into his collection. The correspondence dated from the earliest issues of the colony, and even though the quality and appearance of the early issues paled in comparison to the new brightly colored and sharply engraved stamps now appearing throughout the world, Vaughan was happy to add them to his album. He could not have known that the strange One-Cent was unique, but he likely did recognize it as being from the scarce emergency issue of 1856—and he certainly knew that he did not have an example.
Shortly afterwards, Vaughan received a packet of unused foreign stamps on approval from Albert Smith and Company. Smith, located in Bath, England, had been in business since the 1860s and was one of the world’s first stamp dealers. The firm’s advertisements in all the major magazines for boys throughout the English-speaking world created a lucrative business during the first decades of the hobby. Smith was also the publisher of the Stamp-Collector’s Magazine, 1863–74, one of the best regarded of the early periodicals devoted to stamps.
In the 1 July 1865 issue of the magazine Mr. (later Judge) Frederick Adolphus Philbrick described and illustrated what is now recognized as the 1856 issue: oblong rectangles printed in black on surface colored paper. He described two 4-cent values only, one on deep magenta, the other on deep azure blue:
These stamps are engraved on wood and printed in the colony; a sheet or so only was printed on blue, to replace the old blue 4 c. upright rectangle, but the supply of blue paper failing, they were also printed on pink paper, the shape sufficiently guarding against confusion with the former issue. The circulation of these stamps was of the most limited duration, both kinds are of the highest degree of rarity; few indeed are the happy possessors of either, while those who have the blue may be reckoned twice over on the fingers of one hand, and may be congratulated on having probably the very rarest stamp known to collectors. Two English collections, it is believed, and two only, boast of this matchless blue; while on the continent a specimen is not known to exist. The pink is also of but one less degree of rarity scarcely known even among the élite of collections. All stamps of this issue, which the writer has ever seen, bear an initialed signature, in addition to the usual postmark. In their perfect state these stamps have a margin of considerable width.

Vernon Vaughan’s newfound stamps contained cottonreels and quite likely at least two of Philbrick’s “Third Issue” stamps. (In 1906 Vaughan displayed his collection for the British Guiana Philatelic Society at Georgetown; it still contained a 12-cent cottonreel and an 1856 Four-Cent Black on Blue.) The fact that one of his 1856 oblongs was a one-cent and not listed should have been exciting, but as it was a poor copy with cut corners he decided to sell it in order to buy some of the newer and more attractive issues that he had been sent on approval from Mr. Smith of Bath. He might well have expected to eventually turn up another if not better example among his uncle’s papers.
Vaughan removed the stamp from his album and offered it to a local collector, Neil Ross McKinnon of Berbice. McKinnon, a young Scots gentleman in his early twenties, at first declined. He thought it a bad specimen and objected to it being cut octagonally rather than square. When he understood that Vaughan only wished to sell in order to buy other stamps, McKinnon relented. After Vaughan accepted his offer of six shillings ($1.44), McKinnon is supposed to have given him this observation with the money, “Now look here, my lad, I am taking a great risk in paying so much for this stamp and I hope you will appreciate my generosity.”

McKinnon kept the One-Cent in his collection for about five years, during which period there was an explosion of interest in British Guiana from the fledgling stamp-collecting world. Philatelists were particularly intrigued by the circular cottonreels of 1850, and the few examples that had made their way into the English and European trade had sold for large sums.
From the perspective of 1921, A. D. Ferguson, Fellow of the Royal Philatelic Society, described the early “stamp rush” during those years in the British Guiana Philatelic Journal: “Evidently these comparatively large sums obtained, together with the advertisements of English dealers in local newspapers, acted as an incentive to searchers for stamps. The result was that many searches were made from 1876 on, among private letters, in banks, merchants’ offices, Government offices, etc., as opportunity offered, with the result that hundreds of the early issues were found. In some cases these searches were made without permission by clerks, office-boys, etc., and were promptly sold on the spot.” L. Vernon Vaughan later recalled selling cottonreels as a teenager for a pound ($4.80) each, regardless of denomination.
The most successful buyers turned out to be local collectors, many of whom ran their own standing advertisements offering cash for the early issues. These men, all still in their twenties, included, in addition to Neil Ross McKinnon in New Amsterdam, Edward Chauncy Luard, Charles Guy Austin Wyatt, and Mewburn Garnett in Georgetown. Of these, only Luard would go on to become a prominent philatelist. These young men became, in turn, the source of supply for the English dealers who started receiving large troves of these issues during 1876 and 1877. One consignment sent to Stanley Gibbons in London numbered well over three hundred specimens.
Oddly, it seems that the Demerara collectors were not aware of the activities of McKinnon in Berbice. E. C. Luard, writing in 1882, appeared to have no knowledge of the series of events that had played out during 1877 and 1878. Up to 1876 there were supposedly two complete collections of British Guiana. One belonged to the famous dealer J. B. Moens of Belgium, the second to the equally celebrated Baron Arthur de Rothschild. These collections were valued at one hundred and fifty pounds each at the time. Now it is known that both were short by two issues: the fabled 1850 Two-Cent Cottonreel on Rose-Colored Paper alluded to by Philbrick and the 1856 One-Cent Black on Magenta, the existence of which was not even yet a rumor. Today there are four known single used copies of the former and just one of the latter. In 1876, Neil Ross McKinnon owned all five. A further three covers bearing 2-cent pairs would appear later, one of which plays a role in this story.

The first appearance of the 2-cent cottonreel occurred when McKinnon sold a single copy of the stamp to the twenty-six-year old Liverpool dealer Thomas Ridpath in late 1877. He quickly sold it on to the twenty-seven-year-old Philipp La Rénotière von Ferrary of Paris. For a short period between late 1877 and March 1878 this was the only known copy and the rarest stamp of British Guiana. This particular example is one of the two known single examples in private hands. McKinnon sold two further copies of the 2-cent on rose paper in March and July of 1878, both to Alfred Smith of Bath for something in the range of fifteen pounds each for the pink cottonreels. Very little information has survived regarding private-transaction prices from that period, but it is recorded that Judge Philbrick purchased the first of these specimens from Smith in March for twenty pounds.
By late summer 1878, whether encouraged by his recent windfall or sensing the peak of the market, Neil McKinnon decided to sell his entire collection. With the knowledge that his duplicate copies of the 2-cent cottonreel had fetched very good money, his attention probably turned to the strange little red octagonal One-cent he had purchased five years earlier. The stamp was not pretty, but neither were the earlier circular issues and they were selling well. The problem was that there was no mention in any publication anywhere of any value of this issue apart from 4-cents. What McKinnon needed was an expert opinion.

Edward Loines Pemberton was the leading philatelic expert of the day, certainly in the English-speaking world. He had published the great Stamp Collectors Handbook (1874), his monthly Philatelic Journal was widely circulated and uniformly praised, and his pioneering works on forgeries, Album Weeds, remains a required reference to this day.
McKinnon dispatched his entire collection to his old friend Robert Wylie Hill in Glasgow. Wylie Hill was the grandson of the noted hair and feather merchant Robert Wylie, and beginning about 1875, he spent several years in South America collecting birds to sate the demand for feathered hats at home. It was during this time that Hill would have met McKinnon; two educated young Scotsmen of the same age and living in the same colony could hardly have failed to know each other. McKinnon’s instructions to Hill were simple. The collection was to be sent to Edward Pemberton for his examination, and if he so chose he would then have first refusal at a price of one hundred and ten pounds. (The ten pounds likely represent a commission to Hill.)
Pemberton examined the collection sometime in late September 1878 and pronounced the One-Cent Magenta to be absolutely genuine. For some reason, possibly illness, he did not purchase the collection immediately. He may well have sent the stamps back to Wylie Hill in Scotland with a counteroffer. But what Pemberton did not realize was that McKinnon had stipulated that if he turned down the collection, Hill was to then send letters offering the collection to the major dealers in the country. These would have almost certainly included Stanley Gibbons in London, Alfred Smith of Bath, and Thomas Ridpath of Liverpool.

Ridpath acted first. He later wrote to Bacon that he received Hill’s letter at 4:45 P.M. on 2 October 1878, “and by 8 P.M. I was on my way to Glasgow. I saw Mr. Hill before 9 A.M. next morning, concluded the business and was back in Liverpool all within twenty-four hours.” Ridpath paid £120, and legend has it that Pemberton’s check for £110 arrived shortly afterwards.
Within days Ridpath visited Ferrary in Paris and sold him the One-Cent Black on Magenta, which both parties recognized as a great rarity, although neither could have known it was unique. The price is thought to have been about £150. At the same time, Ridpath exchanged the 2-cent cottonreel for the inferior example he had supplied the previous year. Both stamps would remain in the Ferrary collection for over forty years.
ESTABLISHING AUTHENTICITY
Almost as soon as the One-Cent Black on Magenta had arrived in Britain, it disappeared into the fabled cabinets belonging to Philipp von Ferrary at 57 Rue de Varenne in Paris. During its brief stay in late 1878 it had been seen by a total of four people: Robert Wylie Hill, Thomas Ridpath, James Botteley, and Edward Pemberton. Following Pemberton’s death on 12 December 1878 at the age of 34, only three witnesses remained. Fortunately, Pemberton left a written record of his impression of the stamp in a letter sent the previous month to his friend Frederick Philbrick. He had had the opportunity to examine the McKinnon collection, Pemberton related, and it included a “ONE cent, red, 1856!!! as genuine as anything ever was.”
In British Guiana Neil McKinnon was pursuing his law career and apparently never returned to philately. He may have spoken to Vernon Vaughan at some point about the sale of his stamps to Ridpath because Vaughan’s later recollection of the 1856 One-Cent accounting for twenty-five pounds of the total sum paid for the McKinnon collection is probably the most accurate of the many and varied estimates.
Back in England, a largely accurate description of the One-Cent did appear in the Philatelic Record for January 1882, and it was reprinted verbatim in the Stamp News: A Monthly Journal of Philately the following month. “The old issues of this colony [British Guiana] form a mine from which unexpected treasures are yet to be unearthed. Comparatively few of our readers have ever heard of the existence of a One cent, brown of the same design, and probably issued at the same time, as the large, oblong, magenta and blue Four cents stamps of 1856. And yet we have excellent reasons for chronicling the existence of this stamp, a specimen of which is, we understand, in the collection of M. de. Ferrari. We shall be glad if this gentlemen will give some account of this rarity for the benefit of the many collectors who are as enthusiastic, but in many respect less highly favoured than he is.”
Seven years later, on 3 May 1889, a paper was read before the Philatelic Society, London. The title was “Some New Facts connected with the History of the Postage Stamps of British Guiana.” The author was a twenty-eight-year-old philatelist named Edward Denny Bacon. In his May paper, Bacon does not cite the One-Cent, and there is only a brief synopsis of the 1856 issue as a whole. But it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the ensuing contributions of this one man to the story of the One-Cent Black on Magenta. By gathering all the available information he was able, for the first time, to provide a concise history of the stamps of the colony. In many ways he completed the last work of E. L. Pemberton, whose untimely death ten years previously had left so much information unrecorded.
Judge Philbrick, at this point president of the Royal Philatelic Society, published in the Philatelic Record for June 1889, additional commentary about the One-Cent:
Mr. Pemberton, to whom this stamp was originally offered by Mr. Wyatt, accidentally omitted to close with the offer till too late, but believed firmly in it. He wrote me in November 1878, he was to have given £110 for this, and four circulars of 1850 — five stamps in all. He says the lot included a "ONE cent, red, 1856!!! as genuine as anything ever was." Later on, in the same letter, he adds, " This one cent, '56, red, is queer; no doubt went with the 4 c, blue—nothing unlikely in that; it was a dreadfully poor copy."
"Having examined it myself, I regret I must agree with him that the copy is very poor. The shade of colour is neither full nor bright; the appearance is as if it had been washed out; while the value is not clearly legible. But the people at the Royal Gazette office left this value standing in the list, and they ought to know. Mr. Pemberton's remark that a 1 cent value is not unlikely to have been called for is plausible, and I think we must agree that, so far as our present knowledge goes, there is no impossibility in such a stamp having been created. The absence of another copy, too, notwithstanding the later "finds," is in its favour; but I do not feel in a position, until Gazette notices are traced out, or other official documents supplied, to pronounce definitely on the subject. If admitted to the list, it should be catalogued under, "All reserve."
The reference to “Mr. Wyatt” is a reference to Charles Wyatt, who sent a large find of the 1850 cottonreels to Stanley Gibbons in 1877; here Philbrick seems to confuse him, and possibly the stamps with Wylie Hill. As early as 1881 Philbrick claimed that he had viewed the One-Cent “before it went overseas” and believed it to be an altered 4-cent; this article indicates that, eight years later, he remained unconvinced that the One-Cent was genuine.
1891 saw an event critical to the standing of the One-Cent. Edward Bacon was invited to view the fabulous stamp collection of Philipp von Ferrary. Bacon’s verdict on the stamp was unambiguous: “While in Paris, I had a long-wished-for opportunity of examining the only known copy of the one cent of this issue, of which Herr P. von Ferrary is the fortunate possessor. Doubts have more than once been expressed about the ‘face’ value of this stamp, but after a most careful inspection I have no hesitation whatever in pronouncing it a thoroughly genuine one cent specimen. The copy is a poor one, dark magenta in colour, but somewhat rubbed. It is initialed E. D. W., and dated April Ist (sic), the year not being distinct enough to read.”

Right: Frederick Adolphus Philbrick, from The London Philatelist, vol. XX, 1911. (Courtesy of the Collectors Club, New York City)
Bacon’s comment regarding the doubts expressed about the “face” value of the stamp seems to be aimed directly at Philbrick. On one point, Pemberton, Bacon, and Philbrick were agreed: the One-Cent was a poor specimen. This was a fact conceded by every owner since Vaughan. Pemberton described it as “red” and “queer”; Bacon as “dark magenta” and “rubbed”: both terms which approximate the then and current condition of the stamp. However, Philbrick’s description—“the shade of colour is neither full nor bright; the appearance is as if it had been washed out”—does not accurately reflect the appearance of the stamp today. He also noted that “the value is not clearly legible,” yet it can actually be seen quite clearly with the naked eye.
The only reasonable conclusion to draw from these incongruities is that Philbrick had seen a different stamp. This supposition is supported by circumstantial evidence. First, Philbrick was first made aware of the possible existence of the stamp, via Pemberton’s letter, in November 1878, weeks after Ridpath had already sold the stamp to Ferrary in Paris, and second, just prior to Philbrick’s claim that he examined the stamp “before it went overseas,” a hoard of between eighty and one hundred copies of the 1856 4-cent magenta had appeared, presumably via Mr. Wyatt.
Bacon’s publication of The Stamps of the West Indies in 1891 was met with universal acclaim. The opening editorial of the October issue of the Philatelic Record claimed that “However noteworthy and important the previously-issued productions of the Society have been, we are doubtless correct in stating that in the magnitude of the work undertaken, the importance of the subject, and the successful outcome of their labours, the Stamps of the West Indies transcends all its predecessors.” In particular, the editorial praised the wealth of new information and facsimile reproductions regarding “that Philatelic Parnassus—a complete set of the early issues of Guiana”: “The very scarcest stamps of the mainland colony—British Guiana—are and must remain ‘a dream’ to the vast majority of collectors; … the announcement of the undoubted existence of the oblong 1 c. magenta of the 1856 issue will come as a surprise to thousands of collectors who have, of course, not been fortunate enough to inspect this famous stamp, the possession of which Herr von Ferrary need well be proud.” And in a review proper of the book later in the same issue, the One-Cent was first formally recognized, thirty-five years after it was printed, as unique: “This is without doubt, in our opinion, the rarest stamp in the world, in its solitary grandeur.”
In a coda to the now-settled controversy, on October 23, 1891, Edward Bacon proposed Philipp von Ferrary for membership in the Philatelic Society, and in June 1892 Frederick Philbrick, QC, resigned as President.
FERRARY

Count Philipp la Rénotière von Ferrary was an Austrian nobleman living in France. He devoted his life to philately and amassed the greatest and most comprehensive collection of stamps ever assembled. He had a particular fondness for legendary rarities and counted among his acquisitions seven 1847 “Post Office” Mauritius stamps, an unused 1851 2-cent Hawaiian missionary stamp, and the 1855 Swedish Treskilling Yellow Error.
Ferrary’s acquisition of the One-Cent Black on Magenta greatly enhanced the reputation and recognizability of the stamp, but in the three decades following the publication of Bacon’s work on the stamps of British Guiana little new was published on it. By 1893 the stamp—now accurately described and, in L. N. Williams’s phrase, “almost a legend”—began appearing in catalogues. C. H. Mekeels listed the stamp at $500 used and, amusingly, $750 unused. In the same publication the Two-Cent Cottonreel on Rose Paper was valued at $1,010.
In 1899 Harmsworth’s Monthly Pictorial Magazine printed the article “Postage Stamps Worth Fortunes,” which included an interview with Charles J. Phillips, owner of Stanley Gibbons, Ltd., of London. This article speciously described the One-Cent as an “error,” an inaccuracy that would periodically be revived:
"Most people imagine the Mauritius to be the rarest and most valuable of stamps. In this they are wrong. Mr. Phillips credits the 1856 British Guiana, black on magenta, with this honour."
"At present only one copy is known to be in existence and that is in Paris. It holds an honoured place in the magnificent collection belonging to Mons. Ferrary, son of the late Duchess Galliera."
February 1900 would see the publication of Bacon’s article on the discovery of the 2-cent cottonreels of 1850 in the London Philatelist. This is perhaps the last great work on the early years of the One-Cent as it includes the story of the original sale of the McKinnon collection as recounted by Thomas Ridpath himself. Bacon spoke to him just in time: Ridpath died on 28 October, at age fifty. Save for Andrew Hunter, he would be the first owner of the stamp to die.
The reclusive Ferrary never exhibited his stamps and it was long believed the stamp never left his rooms at the Hôtel Matignon; however, a story purportedly from 1905 and published in the Sunday, November 18, 1906, issue of the San Francisco Call disagrees:
"[As Ferrary] was inspecting an art collection on one occasion a large and handsome canvas that occupied a great portion of wall space was pointed out to him as the most valuable picture in the salon.
"It is worth all of £1,800," said his Informant.
"Then it is not the most valuable picture here," replied Ferrary, and he produced from the depths of a pocket, a card case, inside was a tiny piece of paper, which he carefully held up for his friend. "This," he continued, "is far more costly than your beautiful painting.”
"And pray, what is its value?" exclaimed his incredulous auditor.
"I prize it so highly," answered Ferrary, "that if you were at this instant to offer me £3000 for it I would not take it."
And the bit of paper that the speaker delicately poised on his fingers was merely a postage stamp—not one of the elaborately engraved and beautifully colored contrivances with which the patrons of the mails are familiar, but a crude affair whose typographical appearance would not be indorsed by the humblest printer in all Christendom. The stamp that Ferrary valued so highly is the most precious of all the gems in the realm of philately. It is a British Guiana 1-cent issue of 1856, and only one genuine specimen of this stamp is known to exist."
And yet, at the time, the philatelic world might have been possessed of more facts about Vernon Vaughan than about the enigmatic Philipp von Ferrary. Born Louis Philippe Antoine Marie Augustin Raoul de Ferrari de Galliera, he changed his name to La Rénotière at age thirty-one when he was adopted by Emmanuel La Rénotière ten years after the death of his father. As a boy, he had been encouraged to collect by his mother, supposedly to provide a diversion from his obsession with the Franco-Austrian War. Ferrary’s parents were both fantastically wealthy, but he refused to accept either his father’s inheritance or his title, Duke of Galliera.
Sleight of stature and sickly as a child, he excelled in his studies and became a part-time teacher. Although he had no need to work, there was provision for young men to avoid army service by signing up to teach for ten years. Always scruffily dressed he traveled unnoticed throughout Europe buying everything the major dealers had to offer, often paying in gold or with checks written on notepaper. As time went on his travels became less frequent, especially to countries with particularly barbaric laws in regard to gay men. It made no difference, the dealers came to him.
When his mother left Paris, she gave the magnificent Hôtel Matignon to be used as the Austro-Hungarian embassy, with the proviso that her son could keep an extensive apartment there for the remainder of his life. The Hôtel Matignon is now the official residence of the Prime Minister of France.

When the Great War broke out in July 1914, Ferrary was in Holland. As an Austrian citizen he was technically an enemy of France and so, unable to return to France, he took up residence in Lausanne, Switzerland. In January 1915 he rewrote his will, leaving his entire collection to the Berlin Postal Museum. Records show he may well have been able to return to Paris during 1916, and if this is true, it would have marked the last time he saw his collection.
Philipp La Renotière von Ferrary died at age 67 on 20 May 1917. He suffered a fatal heart attack in a taxicab, reportedly returning from a visit with a local stamp dealer. He was laid to rest in Austria under the name Phillip Arnold, a tribute to a longtime companion and “eternal brother” Albert Arnold Fillatraud, known as Albert Arnold. Ferrary’s will was made public late in 1917. In it he stated his desire that “The philatelic legacy, to which I have dedicated my whole life with the utmost commitment, I leave with pride and joy to my German fatherland.” But with Ferrary’s stamps secure in Paris, France had no intention of releasing the collection.
It was seized as enemy property under provisions of the Treaty of Versailles that came into effect in January 1920. The French government then announced that the collection would be sold at auction, with the proceeds from the sale being deducted from the war reparations owed by Germany to France. After nearly forty years, the One-Cent Black on Magenta was about to leave the Ferrary collection, and was expected to sell for an unprecedented sum for a single used stamp.
THE FERRARY SALE 1922

Fourteen auctions, under the supervision of Monsieur Gerard Gilbert and spanning from 23 June 1921 to 26 November 1925 were needed to disperse the greatest stamp collection the world has ever known. Over 8,000 lots, some of which contained more than 10,000 stamps, including almost every rarity then known, achieved a total of nearly 22 million French francs.
The 1856 One-Cent Black on Magenta appeared as lot 295 in the second session of the third sale on the afternoon of Thursday, 6 April 1922. The stamp’s first ever public viewing took place on the afternoon of Tuesday, 4 April, exactly sixty-six years after its cancellation in British Guiana.
Speculation was rife as to the possible selling price of the stamp. A general consensus appeared to be between 165,000 and 220,000 francs ($15,000-20,000). The previous two Ferrary sales had already set records; however, the franc had strengthened considerably against the dollar in the intervening months thereby diminishing the spending power of the Americans. On the afternoon of the sale, room seven of the Hôtel Drouot was packed. The world’s greatest collectors, mostly represented by agents, mixed with major dealers, the press, and the simply curious to witness the sale of “the world’s rarest stamp.”

Right: Photo plate 7 from the catalogue of the third part of the Ferrary sale, including the first published photograph of the British Guiana. (Both courtesy of the Collectors Club, New York City)
Lot 295 was described simply in French: “GUYANE ANGLAISE.1856. I c. noir sur carmin, catalogue chez Yvert et Tellier sous le no. 12 et sous le no. 23 dans le catalogue de Stanley Gibbons. C’est le seul exemplaire connu, obl.”
The Alsatian Tobacco Magnate Maurice Burrus attended in person; Hugo Griebert, a German-born London dealer represented the Industrialist Arthur Hind; Theodore Champion, the great French dealer, was bidding on behalf of Alfred Liechtenstein; and both Alfred H. Caspary and Henry G. Lapham entrusted their bids to Warren H. Colson of Boston. The two most notable European collectors, King George V of England and King Carol II of Romania, also had agents at the sale.

Arthur Hind had never intended to even bid on the British Guiana. He recounted later that he went for an early morning walk with Hugo Griebert to discuss the sale and during their conversation Griebert talked glowingly about the One-Cent. Such was his enthusiasm that the walk ended with Hind leaving him a bid of $60,000.
The lot opened at 50,000 francs and slowly rose to 100,000. Three contenders, Griebert, Burrus, and Champion, continued to 200,000 in 5,000 franc increments, after which it was left to Griebert and Burrus to battle it out. At 295,000 the bid was with Griebert. Burrus advanced a further thousand before Griebert signaled a bid of 300,000 francs. The auctioneer raised his gavel and then paused, confusion in the room had arisen as to who had made the final bid and all eyes fell on Burrus. With a wave of his hand he conceded the lot, the gavel fell, and the room erupted into applause. The following day newspapers around the world carried the news. With the 17.5 percent French sales tax, the total came to 352,500 francs, £7,343, or $32,500—the world record for a postage stamp and the single most expensive lot in the Ferrary sale.

- Arthur M. Hind (1922–1932)
Clover leaf stamp with initials AH of Arthur Hind.
- Frederick Trouton Small (1940–1970)
Initialed in pencil “FK” by Small's agent Finbar Kenny
- Stuart Weitzman (2014–Present)
Penciled stiletto, and initials SW of Stuart Weitzman
- Frederick Trouton Small (1940–1970)
Comet handstamp of Frederick Small; also initialed in pencil “FK” by his agent Finbar Kenny
- John E. du Pont (1980–2014)
Pencilled initials JEdP of John E. du Pont
- Philipp La Rénotière von Ferrary (1878–1920)
Purple trefoil stamp of Philipp La Rénotière von Ferrary
- Irwin Weinberg and Associates (1970–1980)
Pencilled initials IW of Irwin Weinberg
ARTHUR HIND …. AND ANN HIND SCALA

Arthur Hind could not have been more different than Ferrary. Hind was born in the same month and year the stamp was printed, in Bradford, England, but became a textile magnate in upstate New York, making his fortune manufacturing upholstery for the burgeoning automobile industry. He relished the notoriety of owning the world’s most valuable stamp, freely gave interviews, and frequently loaned the stamp for exhibitions.
No sooner had the stamp arrived in the United States than it was returned to Britain for the first time since 1878. It was shown at the London International Stamp Exhibition from 14–28 May 1923. This was probably the only time the stamp was seen by King George V, who opened the event. It is said that Hind offered the stamp to the King, who politely declined. Hind later recalled His Majesty congratulated him on his purchase.
Over Thanksgiving of 1926, Hind married Ann Leeta Gardanier McMahon. Originally from Constantia, New York, she had married young following the death of her father at 66 in an industrial accident when she and her twin sister were barely sixteen. When she became Ann Leeta Hind, she was thirty-two years younger than her 70-year-old husband.

In “The World’s Rarest Stamp,” a brief article he wrote for the catalogue of the 1928 International Philatelic Exhibition in Melbourne, Hind noted that the 1856 One-Cent “has changed me, philatelically, from an almost unknown modest collector to an almost best known prominent collector.” He also admitted that this particular stamp had caused him to be ridiculed: a New Hampshire pastor stated that Hind’s ownership would virtually guarantee St. Peter barring him from the Pearly Gates, while a London journalist described the 1856 British Guiana as “cut square and magenta in colour” and himself as “cut round and rather paler magenta.”
One story long associated with Hind’s ownership of the stamp has never been authenticated—probably because it is untrue—and yet it is rather too good to debunk. In 1928, a collector wrote an anonymous letter to Stamp and Cover Collector’s Review claiming that he too had owned a One-Cent Magenta, which he had purchased, unrecognized, many years before when the merchant vessel he was working on made port in Georgetown. After the publicity surrounding the Ferrary auction, this unnamed collector realized that he had a treasure that should be worth more to Hind than to anyone else. He arranged a meeting at Hind’s Utica, New York, home. Hind examined the second stamp, accepted its authenticity, and agreed on a price for it. After cash and the stamp had changed hands, Hind lit a cigar and then held his newly acquired stamp to the match. When the stamp was ash, Hind looked at the seller and declared, “There’s only one magenta One Cent Guiana.”
Just before the collapse of the stock market in the crash of 1929 he supposedly put the collection up for sale and received an offer of $480,000—but he wanted $500,000. Soon afterwards his health, as well as his marriage, began to decline. Arthur Hind died of pneumonia in Palm Beach, Florida, on March 1, 1933.
In his will, Arthur Hind left the bulk of his still very considerable fortune to his family in England. Ann Hind, his estranged wife, was bequeathed very little: the “dwelling, furniture, paintings but not my stamp collection.” In the summer of 1933 Mrs. Hind claimed one-third of the estate, as provided to widows by recent New York State Law, as well as the British Guiana, which she averred had been a gift to her from her husband the year before his death.
Although Ann Hind’s case for ownership of the stamp was based solely on that assertion, an unforeseen—and unrelated—development bolstered her position. After he lost interest in his stamps, Hind had moved his philatelic collection from his personal study into a bank vault, but when the stamps were inventoried the British Guiana was nowhere to be found. Frantic searches failed to locate it, and not until the safe in Hind’s study on Maple Street was examined was the One-Cent discovered. As it was in the couple’s “dwelling,” the contents of which had also been left to Mrs. Hind, a reasonable argument could be made that the British Guiana did belong to her.

Mrs. Hind did not wear her widow’s weeds for long: on November 8, 1933, she secretly wed Pascal Costa Scala, a local man fifteen years her junior. In early May 1934, by which time the marriage had been disclosed, the suit contesting the will was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Mrs. Hind Scala deemed the settlement “satisfactory.” The one detail that was publicly confirmed was that the ownership of the One-Cent Black on Magenta had been established: it was Mrs. Scala’s.
Arthur Hind’s collection was variously dispersed through auction and private sale in the United States and England. His British and foreign stamps were consigned to a series of auctions at H. R. Harmer in London, and the rest of the British Guiana collection was sold on May 7, 1934. Perhaps to take advantage of the generally strong results of that auction—and perhaps motivated as well by the illness of George V (he would die on 20 January 1936)—Mrs. Scala consigned the One-Cent with the London firm of Harmer, Rooke for an auction on 30 October 1935. The sale was titled “Rare Postage Stamps, including the World-Famous British Guiana 1856, 1c. magenta, offered by order of Mrs. Arthur Hind.”

Prior to the sale the One-Cent Black on Magenta was submitted, for the first time, to the Expert Committee of the Royal Philatelic Society, London. Among those who would have viewed it was the 75-year-old Edward Denny Bacon. The stamp was certified as genuine by "the Royal" on October 17, 1935. The Harmer, Rooke catalogue trumpeted the news of the certification and succinctly described the One-Cent as “unquestionably the world’s rarest and most valuable stamp.”

The London Daily Mail tracked down Louis Vernon Vaughan, still living in British Guiana, to ask how he felt about the prospect of the stamp selling for twenty-five thousand times the six shillings he had received more than sixty years previously. He appeared more bemused than regretful:
[I]t is apparently coming into the market again—and the world's greatest stamp dealers and philatelists are ready to outbid each other and pay ridiculous sums of money for that little scrap of paper that I once owned. Really, it does seem remarkable! People ask me what I think about it. … As a matter of fact, I hardly ever think of it at all now and never with disappointment or chagrin. What is the use?

At the sale, the bidding opened at £3,500 and was steadily advanced to £7,500 ($37,500), which was still below the reserve set by Mrs. Scala (said to have been $42,500), and so the stamp was withdrawn, unsold, and returned to the United States. The final bid had been placed by Percy Loines Pemberton, son of Edward Loines Pemberton, who so nearly purchased the One-Cent as part of the McKinnon collection in 1878.
Mrs. Scala continued to promote and offer the stamp, and it next appeared for private sale in September 1938 with Ernest G. Jarvis of the Kenwood Stamp Company, Buffalo, New York. With the death of King George two years before, the owner had obviously reconsidered her price and it was now available for $37,500, but there were no takers. The same year, on 5 June the great philatelist Edward Denny Bacon, who had done so much to enhance the recognition and reputation of the British Guiana, died in London.
In 1940 Mrs. Hind Scala was asked and agreed to display the British Guiana at the New York World’s Fair. The stamp arrived in Flushing, New York, in an armored car, a condition imposed by the Lloyds of London underwriters who were now insuring the stamp for close to $50,000. The next owner of the One-Cent Magenta may well have seen the stamp at the New York World’s Fair; if he didn’t, he still could hardly have been unaware of the publicity surrounding its exhibition. There was however one person who definitely did see the stamp. A young collector from Pennsylvania by the name of Irwin Weinberg.
Sadly Ann Scala’s marriage to Pascal ended in divorce on the grounds of infidelity in 1942. Shortly after, in June 1945, her twin sister found her dead from a barbiturate overdose at age fifty-seven. She was buried in the Hind family plot, next to her husband.
FREDERICK T. SMALL

Frederick “Poss” Trouton Small was born on May 20, 1888 in Capricornia, Queensland. Trained as an engineer at the University of Queensland before the First World War, Small enlisted on September 4, 1914, and served on the Gallipoli peninsula as a chief tunnel engineer. After marrying in Australia, Small moved to Great Britain then on to the United States, working as an engineer for the Celanese Corporation and rising to vice president in 1940. Before his death, and after his identity as an owner of the British Guiana was known, Small explained that he "didn't consider [his] stamp collection as a hobby, but as an investment, just like shares of stock." He evidently considered the 1856 One-Cent a blue chip, because he discreetly approached Finbar Kenny, manager of the stamp department at Macy’s, to see if the stamp could be purchased. Kenny, in turn, contacted Mrs. Scala, who agreed on a price of $45,000. The sale was announced on August 8, 1940, but it was shrouded in such secrecy that even Ann Hind Scala did not know the identity of the buyer.
In 1949, after a long career during which he rose to become the Chief Commissary of Taxation for West Central Berbice, Louis Vernon Vaughan died at the age of eighty-eight. The finder and first owner lived his entire life in British Guiana where he married, raised a family and lived a long life.

Through Kenny’s auspices, Small did make the One-Cent available for exhibition. It was featured at the 1947 United States Stamp Centenary in New York, at MIPEX in Melbourne in 1963, and, most famously, as the cornerstone of the 1965 Stanley Gibbons Catalogue Centenary in 1965—the first time the stamp had been shown in Great Britain since 1923.
While in Small’s possession the British Guiana was also highlighted in a 1954 Life magazine article “Stamp Album Worth $1,000,000.” Evidently for the first time, the back of the stamp was illustrated in this article, revealing the ownership marks of Ferrary, Hind, and “the present owner [whose] name … is one of the world’s best-kept secrets.”
Small’s identity was only publicly revealed when, having been advised not to leave stamps in his Estate, he consigned them for auction. The balance of his collection of stamps from British Guiana sold at Robson Lowe in London on 22 March 1970, under the humorously ironic title “The ‘Great’ Collection.” Two days later, the One-Cent Magenta came under the hammer with Robert Siegel of New York.
IRWIN WEINBERG AND THE WILKES-BARRE EIGHT

Small would not be disappointed with his decision. The reappearance of this most famous of stamps after thirty years ignited a firestorm of publicity. The evening sale took place before a packed audience of philatelists, the media, and the merely curious. When the stamp again set a record—selling for $280,000 to an investment consortium headed by Irwin Weinberg of Miner Stamp Co.—the resulting press coverage included front-page, above-the-fold stories everywhere from the New York Times to the Wilkes-Barre Record and an article in Life magazine titled “A One-Cent Treasure.” The Life article featured a photograph of auctioneer Andrew Levitt displaying the One-Cent Black on Magenta behind the bars of a bank vault.

Irwin Weinberg, who still issued a regular mimeographed price list of stamps up until his death in 2016, had been a dealer for nearly thirty years already when the One-Cent came up at auction in 1970, and he remembered seeing the stamp at the New York City World’s Fair. He went to the sale as the front man and general partner of a syndicate of eight businessmen from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who were looking for a hedge against inflation.
In promoting the British Guiana, Weinberg outdid Arthur Hind, as he made every effort to publicize the purchase and find a new buyer. Trailed by bodyguards, Weinberg carried the stamp around the world in a briefcase ostentatiously handcuffed to his wrist. In a decade of globetrotting, he took the stamp to Zurich, Tokyo, Prague, Hamburg, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, London, Sydney, New Delhi, Toronto, New York, and Philadelphia.
At this point, Weinberg admitted that he had begun to feel that the stamp owned him, rather than the other way around, and he and his stakeholders decided that it was time to test the effectiveness of their investment strategy.
JOHN DU PONT

After just a decade’s absence from the sales room, the One-Cent Magenta again appeared at a Siegel auction, April 5, 1980. As an investment, the stamp proved successful: it was sold to an anonymous bidder for $935,000. The buyer was in the room, but had left bidding instructions with the auctioneer prior to the sale, so he was able to watch the auction without drawing attention to himself.
In 1986, the new owner displayed the 1856 One-Cent as part of an exhibition of classic stamps of British Guiana at Ameripex ’86 International Stamp Show in Chicago and was awarded the Grand Prix International. Although the owner of the stamp was there identified by the pseudonym Rae Mader (an anagram of Demerara), it was shortly revealed, and had earlier been suspected, that the owner was actually John du Pont, heir to the eponymous chemical company fortune, eccentric amateur sportsman, and omnivorous collector.
Du Pont only exhibited the stamp one other time: at CUPEX 87 in Perth, in conjunction with the 1987 America’s Cup. The One-Cent was returned from Australia on a Sunday, when there was no access to the bank vault that usually housed the stamp. And on that night—but only that one night—it is true that du Pont slept with the stamp under his pillow.
Nearly nine years later, on January 26, 1996, Du Pont shot and killed World and Olympic wrestling champion Dave Schultz at his Foxcatcher Farm estate in Pennsylvania. Following his arrest and conviction he was sentenced to 13 to 30-years in prison, where he died on December 9, 2010, aged 72.
STUART WEITZMAN

The purchase of the One-Cent Black on Magenta by the renowned shoe designer fulfilled a childhood dream. Wishing to share his good fortune he immediately offered to display the stamp at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., where it has resided on continuous public view with the exception of a week spent at the Spring 2016 World Stamp Show in New York.
A Young Collector Sets Eyes on The British Guiana