Stamp and Coin Collectors: One plus One equals One

Stamp and Coin Collectors: One plus One equals One

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  Julian Cassady Photography

   

  Stamps and coins, or coins and stamps: the two collecting disciplines have, seemingly forever, been inextricably linked together in our collective consciousness.
  
  Even today, when Main Street coin and stamp shops have all but gone the way of the Dodo, it is impossible to think of one without thinking of the other.
  
  Stamp and coin collecting have a long history together. Although coin collecting is more venerable, reaching back millennia, stamp collecting came on strong beginning with the first appearance of postage stamps in the mid-nineteenth century. Stamp and coin, or coin and stamp shops became ubiquitous, and as an intertwined collector base grew dramatically it was catered to at all levels.
  

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  The New York Coin and Stamp Company and J.W. Scott are but two 19^th century stalwarts that straddled both fields, and the latter remains well-known as a name still used around the world in standard philatelic catalogues. As small shopfront stores mushroomed everywhere, in the United States many department stores were renowned for their divisions that catered to coin and stamp collectors alike: Gimbels, Macy’s and Marshall Field’s are the most vividly remembered. The dual fascination continues today: both the Mystic Stamp Company and Littleton Coins were the inspiration of Maynard Sundman, whose name is renowned by both numismatists and philatelists, and in England the venerable coin dealer Spink more recently embraced stamps as well. To keep abreast of the latest news, nearly every large newspaper had a Coin and Stamp editor, one of the most famous being Ernest Kehr of the New York Herald Tribune, who covered the travels of the British Guiana in the 1940s, and whose inquiry launched the Secret Service investigation into the theft of the 1933 Double Eagles.
  

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  The junction of coins and stamps (stamps and coins) at the everyman level were, and are, well taken care of, while in the stratosphere of collecting the weave is just as tight, if not more so.
  
  The legendary British Guiana one-cent black on magenta — the greatest prize in philately — was the centerpiece, the non-pareil trophy, of what was the greatest stamp collection ever formed, that of Count Philipp la Rénotière von Ferrary. Its contents eclipsed those of any collection formed before, or since, and its sale between 1922 and 1925 required fourteen catalogues.

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  But Ferrari (as his name is spelled by the numismatic community) was also a coin collector of stunning achievement. His collection of British coins formed a landmark sale at Sotheby’s when sold in 1922: “The Property of a Nobleman” is still cited in standard works for its array of rarities. He also amassed spectacular collections of the coins of France, the Low Countries, Germany, the papal states, and Scandinavia which were sold at auction. And in 1922 a portion of Ferrari’s French collection was privately sold intact to that greatest of all coin collectors, Virgil Brand, for the staggering sum of $120,000.

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  So too, that other philatelic treasure, America’s most famous, the Inverted Jenny plate block, was once owned by one of the most out-sized collector/hoarders of both coins and stamps: Col. Edward H.R. Green. Although the specific details of his vast holdings are the stuff of legend and rumor, little more needs to be said than that Green owned all five of the 1913 Liberty head nickels (of which one recently sold for a reported six million dollars) and the entire sheet of the inverted Jennys, of which Stuart Weitzman’s plate block is its greatest component part.

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  And finally, King Farouk of Egypt. Almost impossible to categorize, his collecting habits in all areas were gargantuan. In 1954, when Sotheby’s sold his stamp and coin collections in Cairo the high prices for the stamps (some of which had once been Ferrary’s) stunned many. And his coin collection, sold a few weeks later, contained more than 80,000 pieces (including a number formerly Ferrari’s, augmented by stars once owned by Col. Green) and set the world agog. And of course it was Farouk’s collection that contained that most coveted of all coins: the 1933 Double Eagle.

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  Julian Cassady Photography

   

  But Ferrary (Ferrari), Green, and Farouk did not exist in a vacuum, and the conjoined stamp and coin collecting intersection is a well trafficked one. The British Royal family has long been renowned for their fabulous collection of stamps, but has a significant collection of coins as well; the Rothschild family collected both with gusto; President Franklin D. Roosevelt dabbled in coins and was a stamp man of the first order (when his collection was sold at auction, Farouk was among the buyers); and pharmaceutical king Josiah K. Lilly’s stamp collection was sold for record prices while his coins (many formerly from Col. Green and King Farouk) are now part one of the Smithsonian Institutions most revered numismatic holdings. More recently, the former L.A. Laker’s owner Jerry Buss was similarly captivated by both fields.
  
  

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  And then there is Stuart Weitzman. Through tenacity and passion he managed to collect three extraordinary objects which synthesize this ages old infatuation with both fields: he sought and acquired the greatest single prizes from the monumental collections formed by some of the greatest coin and stamp collectors who ever lived.
  
  Although his achievement may evoke the longing and envy of other collectors, he is simply the most fortunate of those countless young women and men, who, over the course of a century and a half have been similarly smitten by both stamps and coins — coins and stamps.
  

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