Incredibly Rare Find -- If Real
by Bill McAllister
It has to be one of the ugliest stamps ever produced. But for decades the poorly-printed, magenta octagonal from British Guiana has been considered the world's rarest stamp, a 1-cent stamp that last sold for $ 935,000 in 1980. Now Stamp Collector, a philatelic newspaper, is reporting that there may be a second copy of the stamp. The new discovery is undergoing tests by the Royal Philatelic Society in Great Britain to determine if it is genuine. If those tests, expected to take several more months, uphold the stamp's validity it could be "the major stamp story of the decade," says Stamp Collector publisher Wayne L. Youngblood. The second copy is as badly damaged as the first copy, but it supposedly has better color than the first. The 1-cent British Guiana was hurriedly produced in the South American British colony by a local newspaper printer after the local post office in British Guiana ran out of 1- and 4-cent stamps printed in England. That was 1856, and a small number of the stamps were printed and used on letters. While several 4-cent stamps have appeared, only one 1-cent stamp has ever been located. That stamp is owned by multimillionaire murderer John E. du Pont, who was sentenced to prison for shooting an Olympic wrestler who lived on his Pennsylvania estate. The new discovery is supposedly owned by a German stamp dealer who purchased it from a Romanian dancer in the mid-1980s. She had inherited it from her father, a Russian nobleman, according to Stamp Collector. If the stamp is found to be genuine, Swiss auctioneer David Feldman is planning to sell the stamp. "This stamp has puzzled a number of the experts in the field," he told Stamp Collector. "It's definitely not a black-and-white case." 
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