Posted on by Willem

Saturday/ stamps of the world 📮

I attended the opening ceremony of the Boston 2026 World Expo stamp show, and spent the best part of the day looking at the displays, and checking out the offerings from the vendors. (And making a few acquisitions— nothing too extravagant).

There was a little pomp and ceremony during the opening of the exhibition. A marching band called the Concord and Acton Minutemen came in. They performed the national anthem for us, and then marched out.
Lexington is known for Lexington Common, or Battle Green, where the first shot of the American Revolutionary War was fired.
This picture is from the end of the opening ceremony, with the unveiling of ten new stamps issued by the United States Postal Service, called Treasures of the Revolutionary Era. On the stage are several dignitaries of the Expo, of the USPS and the Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (The Honorable Kim Driscoll).
A view of the main exhibition hall as one descends down the escalator from the main lobby. There are some 10,000 exhibits with a total of 4,000 frames, each with 16 pages, on display.
An estimated inventory of some $10 million worth of stamps are for sale at the booths of the vendors and at the auctions that will be held.
The USPS is a major sponsor of the show and there were long lines at the counters in the morning.
Prints of about 2 ft x 3 ft of stamps of the world adorn the panels that form the spaces on the floor of the exhibition center. I still have to track down the ones depicting stamps from South Africa. (Do you know where in the world Zanzibar is?)
An offering for serious collectors that also have deep pockets: a whole sheet of the 1918 issue of USA airmail stamps, 24c apiece, can be yours for $13,000.
The 24c airmail stamp from the previous picture was printed in separate runs for the red link and blue ink.
On one AND ONLY ONE SHEET, the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplane was accidentally printed upside down. These stamps are called the 1918 24¢ “Inverted Jenny”. 
When this single sheet of 100 Inverted Jenny stamps was purchased by William T. Robey in May 1918, it was quickly sold to stamp dealer Eugene Klein. Klein then sold the intact sheet to the eccentric multimillionaire collector Colonel Edward H. R. Green.
Colonel Green instructed Klein to break the sheet up into single stamps and smaller blocks. While most of the sheet was split into individual singles, Green deliberately kept the most important positional units intact.
The Centerline Block of Four is shown in this picture: Taken from the exact center of the original sheet of 100, this block features the horizontal and vertical guide lines used by the printers. This unique centerline block survived intact and sold at a Spink auction in 2019 for $1,740,000.
The famous Cape of Good Hope stamp from the Cape Colony in South Africa, issued 1853 to 1864. It was the world’s first triangular stamp. This panel is part of a thematic collection of triangular stamps of the world.
And here is the stamp that started it all: the 1840 Penny Black issued in the United Kingdom.
These were imperforate and cut apart with scissors. This is one has four full margins around the edges of the stamp. The display envelope with the stamp on goes for $295. So far I have resisted the temptation to buy one!

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