The appeal of the British Guiana One-Cent Magenta may seem inexplicable, but it tells a very human story
It has been described as a “shoddy-looking thing”, and like “a red-wine stain or a receipt that’s been through the wash a few times”. The item in question is a stamp, one of a kind. It is now on public view in London, ahead of its auctioning in New York in June, when it is expected to fetch around £10m.
The story of the British Guiana One-Cent Magenta began when, in 1855, only 5,000 of an expected 50,000 stamps were shipped to the colony from England. The postmaster therefore commissioned “contingency” stamps – crude versions of the official issues, some of them four-cent stamps for letters, some one-cent stamps for newspapers, which were briefly put into circulation. Not a single example of the one-cent stamp was known to have been kept, until a small boy called Vernon Vaughan found one among his uncle’s papers in 1873 and sold it to a chum for six shillings.
