The Remarkable Story of the World’s Rarest Stamp

The rarely seen, one-of-a-kind 1856 British Guiana One-Cent Magenta, which recently sold for a whopping $9.5 million, gets its public debut 

The 1856 British Guiana One-Cent Magenta, with its three-masted sailing ship, carries the postal clerk Edmond D. Wight’s initials to deter counterfeiters.(Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum)

The 1856 British Guiana One-Cent Magenta, with its three-masted sailing ship, carries the postal clerk Edmond D. Wight’s initials to deter counterfeiters.(Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum)

To see in person the 1856 British Guiana One-Cent Magenta—better known as “the rarest stamp in the world”—is a bit like looking at a red-wine stain or a receipt that’s been through the wash a few times.

The octagonal scrap of magenta paper, bearing a postmark and illustration of a three-masted ship, or barque, isn’t much to look at. But as the only known stamp of its kind, with a strange and peculiar origin story replete with colorful characters and record-breaking sales at auction, well, let us say that there is much more to this unspectacular stamp than meets the eye. Beginning today, the exhibit of the British Guiana One-Cent Magenta at the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C. explores what the museum’s chief curator of philately Daniel Piazza calls its “long, most interesting, circuitous history.”

That history began in 1855, when just 5,000 of an expected 50,000 stamps arrived from Great Britain to its colony of British Guiana on the northern coast of South America. Shorted by 90 percent, the local postmaster found himself in a tough spot. If the colony’s letters and newspapers were to be delivered, he was going to need some way to show the transaction of postage paid. So he decided to issue a provisional stamp to keep the mail moving until more postage could arrive from overseas. The only place that could create something with enough official cache to do the job in 1850s British Guiana was the local newspaper, the Royal Gazette.

Visitors will get a rare chance to see the back of the stamp, which includes markings from its previous owners, including Count Philipp von Ferrary and John E. du Pont.

Visitors will get a rare chance to see the back of the stamp, which includes markings from its previous owners, including Count Philipp von Ferrary and John E. du Pont.

The Gazette printer’s admiral imitation worked and the postmaster moved quickly to remove them from circulation once they’d served their purpose (though Piazza cannot say exactly how long, he estimates they were in use about eight to 10 weeks). Since the one-cent stamps were used for newspapers, which few people saved, as opposed to the four-cent stamps used for letters, most disappeared shortly after their usage. The existence of the One-Cent Magenta would likely have been forgotten altogether had it not been for a 12-year-old Scottish boy named Vernon Vaughan, living in British Guiana, who found one odd stamp among his uncle’s papers in 1873. By this time the stamp had been postmarked and initialed by a local postal clerk (a common practice at the time to discourage counterfeiters), and appeared well used. The peculiar stamp hardly struck the boy as very valuable, so the budding philatelist soon sold it for a less-than-princely six shillings (about $10 in today’s dollars) and bought a packet of foreign stamps that he apparently found more aesthetically appealing. Thus began the decades-long, cross-continental journey of the One-Cent Magenta.

After that initial sale, the stamp was picked up then passed along from one collector to the next before it was spotted in 1878 by Count Philippe la Renotière von Ferrary, who was the owner of what has been called the most complete worldwide stamp collection ever to exist. Arguably the greatest stamp collector in history, Ferrary would have known how unusual the stamp was as soon as he saw it, so he snatched it up in a private sale. As more was learned of the stamp’s provenance, it grew to become a prized item in Ferrary’s collection, which upon his death in 1917, was donated to Berlin’s postal museum.

Read the full story at Smithsonian.

With an infrared filter, the stamp’s red surface is removed to better view the markings, which include the colony’s motto Damus Petimus Que Vicissim, meaning: We give and we ask in return.

With an infrared filter, the stamp’s red surface is removed to better view the markings, which include the colony’s motto Damus Petimus Que Vicissim, meaning: We give and we ask in return.