Custom picture frame orders will always be my favorite and most fun part of my business. This customer is a stamp collector and wanted to be able to hang this stamp on the wall, so I came up with this double matted frame made specifically to the measurements of her stamp sheet.
This is a unique stamp that commemorates the 1918 24-cent Inverted Jenny stamp. Ninety-five years ago, the United States Post Office Department inadvertently printed a stamp with an upside-down image of a Curtiss Jenny biplane. Just one sheet of these stamps was sold before a customer identified the error. This printing mistake has made the Inverted Jenny one of the rarest and most valuable stamps in collecting history. Imagine the excitement of finding such a sheet of stamps.
Below is what is written on the back of the sheet of stamps that I framed:
‘When a 24-cent stamp debuted on May 14, 1918, to commemorate the start of the first regularly scheduled airmail service, collectors knew it had been rushed into production and would be printed in two colors, which meant that rare and valuable errors might slip into circulation. Even so, William T. Robey of Washington, D.C., was flabbergasted to discover a sheet of 100 stamps mistakenly showing the Curtiss JN-4H, the biplane known as the “Jenny,” upside down. “The clerk reached down under the counter and brought forth a full sheet,” Robey recounted 20 years later, “and my heart stood still.” He would soon learn that he had purchased the only sheet of erroneous stamps to fall into public hands. Airmail service began the next day between Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, thanks to pioneering aviators like Reuben H. Fleet (shown on front). Over time, the Inverted Jenny sheet was broken up and sold, creating some of the most coveted collectibles in the world. Today, two Inverted Jenny stamps soar among the treasures at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C. With the opening of the William H. Gross Stamp Gallery in 2013 – the museum’s 20th anniversary – visitors will also see a loaned block of four Inverted Jennys, one of only a handful in existence, in a setting that honors the innumerable ways one stamp can turn a moment in history upside down.’
I hope you enjoy this little piece of history as much as I have and hope you like the picture frame that was made for it.
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