At a stamp collectors club, he allegedly threatened to burn all the straight-edged stamps and was only dissuaded by the horror of his fellow collectors, who implored him to cease. While the prices of the stamps continued to rise, Green’s remaining stamps became the focus of one particularly unbelievable philatelic legend. Green kept the best examples for himself, and sold the remaining ones for between $175 and $250. Green created one block of eight stamps, seven blocks of four stamps and 64 individual stamps with various perforations depending on their location. Klein convinced Green, the son of the notorious and parsimonious “Witch of Wall Street”, to divide up the original sheet and number the backs of each stamp in order to keep a record of their ownership. As one writer notes in his retelling of the events they “blossomed into the Taj Mahal of stamps, the Fort Knox of collecting, the Mona Lisa of timbromanie and the Holy Grail of philately.” By now, the so-called “Inverted Jennies” were growing in notoriety. Klein quickly sold the sheet to his friend, Edward Green, and made a sizeable profit on the deal. Had Robey been patient, he could have made even more. But the other mistakes were caught and destroyed. Its symbolic of a much larger blunder that emerged from his panicked selling: Robey assumed that more flawed stamps would emerge since they were typically printed on a larger 400-subject plate. The money allowed the Robeys to purchase a new house along with a car, which as the story goes, William promptly drove through the back wall of his garage. Under mounting scrutiny, he was eager to make a deal, and in a panic, he sold the stamps to Eugene Klein, a Philadelphia businessman an avid philatelist for $15,000. Of course, Robey rebuffed their offers, and for a few days, he hid the sheet of stamps under the mattress in a one-room apartment he shared with his wife. Soon after, he sent word of the mistake to fellow friends and collectors, and it didn’t take long for the news to spread to postal inspectors, who were eager to reclaim the errant stamps. When he saw the error, Robey saw opportunity, and he coolly asked to purchase a 100-count sheet for $24. Even luckier for Robey, the person selling him the stamps on that fateful day had never seen an airplane and couldn’t tell the difference. Instead of flying high through the skies, the Jenny on his stamp appeared upside down, as if it were doing an elaborate aerial flip for some grand barnstorming performance. It was just the second time the Postal Service had attempted a two-color stamp and with the fervor of World War I, sloppy mistakes were a more likely occurrence.Īmong the many philatelists, Robey was the lucky one. The striking color scheme no doubt wooed buyers, but like many of the avid collectors who gathered at post offices in Philadelphia, New York and the nation’s capital, Robey also knew that it enabled an even more spectacular possibility-a printing error. It featured a Curtiss JN-4 or “ Jenny”, the same plane set to deliver the mail the following day, and was printed in carmine rose and deep blue. airmail service, set to make its first official flight the following day. There, he hoped to purchase a new stamp celebrating the launch of the U.S.
Robey, a bank teller at Hibbs and Company in Washington D.C., traveled, as he often did, to the post office on New York Avenue. During his lunch break on May 14, 1918, William T.
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