Inverted Jenny Stamp: Value, History and Real Prices

An original 1918 Inverted Jenny is a six- or seven-figure stamp, and the exact figure depends on which of the hundred it is. The best known example, position 49, sold at Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries on 11 November 2023 for a hammer price of US$1,700,000; with the 18 per cent buyer's premium the total was US$2,006,000, the highest price ever paid for an Inverted Jenny (the 1868 Z Grill later sold for US$4,366,000 in June 2024). The same stamp had sold at Siegel in November 2018 for US$1,593,000.

Position 49 is the benchmark because of three things: strong colour, a design well centred inside its margins, and gum that has never had a hinge on it. Stamps from the same sheet with creases, thin spots, heavy cancels or poor centring have sold for a fraction of that.

Each of the hundred stamps is tracked individually by position number in a published census, with owners and sale dates recorded. That census is why a seller cannot simply produce an unknown example: a Jenny with no position and no history is treated as a fake until proven otherwise.

The 24-cent stamp was issued on 10 May 1918 for the first scheduled airmail route, between Washington, Philadelphia and New York. Twenty-four cents was a striking rate at a time when a first-class letter cost three cents, and the high price reflected how experimental the service was.

The design needed two colours — a carmine frame and a blue Curtiss JN-4 biplane, the trainer aircraft nicknamed the Jenny. Two colours meant two passes through the press, and on the second pass one sheet went through the wrong way up. Either a sheet of printed frames was loaded upside down, or the plate that printed the aeroplane was mounted inverted.

Inspectors caught the other misprinted sheets. One got out. William T. Robey, a collector who had been watching for exactly this, bought it at the New York Avenue post office in Washington on 14 May 1918 for the sheet's face value of $24. He sold it to the dealer Eugene Klein for $15,000, and Klein sold it on to Colonel Edward H. R. Green for $20,000. Green had the sheet broken up into singles, blocks and a plate block, which is why the stamps have individual histories today.

Most stamps sent in as "my Inverted Jenny" are one of three other things.

• The 2013 USPS reissue. On 22 September 2013 the Postal Service reissued the design as a $2 stamp in a souvenir sheet of six, launched at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. These are modern, self-adhesive where the original is not, denominated $2 rather than 24 cents, and worth roughly their face value. As a promotion the USPS also printed 100 panes with the plane the right way up and distributed them at random; those upright panes are the scarce ones from 2013.
• Souvenir cards and reproductions. Philatelic exhibitions and publishers have printed Jenny images on cards and labels for decades. They have no postal validity and usually say so in small print.
• Forgeries. These include photographic copies, and genuine 24-cent stamps that have had the centre cut out and reinserted upside down. A trimmed perforation edge or a join line under magnification gives most of them away.

An original is a 24-cent stamp, perforated, printed on paper with no self-adhesive backing, and it should come with a current expertising certificate and a position number. Without those two documents, treat the price as speculative.

The 1869 Pictorial Issue produced America's first inverted centres, on the 15-cent, 24-cent and 30-cent values, and the 1901 Pan-American series produced more. None of them is as famous as the Jenny.

What the Jenny had was a story that travelled: a single sheet, a named buyer who went looking for it, a fast resale at a thousand times face value, and an aeroplane — the most modern thing imaginable in 1918 — printed upside down. Newspapers covered it at the time and have covered it at every subsequent sale.

The fame feeds the price. Bidders at the top of the market are buying a recognisable object as much as a rarity, which is why a Jenny with 93 known siblings outsells scarcer stamps that nobody outside philately has heard of.

Do not soak it, do not trim it, and do not try to flatten it. Handle it with tongs or not at all, and keep it out of light and humidity — our guide to storing and caring for stamps covers the basics.

Then get it looked at before you get excited. The Philatelic Foundation and the American Philatelic Expertizing Service both issue certificates that the market accepts; an auction house will normally arrange this for a consignment. A certificate costs a modest fee against the sums involved and is the only thing that converts a guess into a price.

Photograph it and the app identifies it, which will at least tell you quickly whether you are holding a 24-cent stamp from 1918 or a $2 sheet from 2013.