British Guiana 1c Magenta

When a shipment of stamps failed to arrive, the Georgetown postmaster E. T. E. Dalton had the Official Gazette printers Joseph Baum and William Dallas produce an emergency issue in 1856. Dissatisfied with the result, he had every stamp initialled by a clerk; this one bears E. D. W. Wight's initials. In 1873 the Scottish schoolboy Louis Vernon Vaughan found it among family letters and sold it to the local collector Neil McKinnon. The Liverpool dealer Thomas Ridpath bought McKinnon's collection in 1878 and sold the stamp the same year to Philipp von Ferrary. After Ferrary's death in 1917 France seized his collection as war reparations; Arthur Hind bought the stamp at the Paris sale in April 1922. It later passed to Frederick Small, who sold it in 1970 to a syndicate led by Irwin Weinberg; John du Pont bought it in 1980 for $935,000. His estate sold it at Sotheby's New York on 17 June 2014 to Stuart Weitzman for $9,480,000, and at Sotheby's on 8 June 2021 it sold for $8,307,000 to Stanley Gibbons, which has since offered fractional ownership and shown it at exhibitions.

Culture

British colonial

Medium

Black printing on magenta paper, corners clipped; initialled 'E.D.W.' and postmarked Demerara

Origin

Georgetown, Guyana (British Guiana)