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.

One Inverted Jenny is still missing for certain: position 66, stolen in 1955. Beyond that, the stamp literature has long said that seven of the hundred have been lost or destroyed through theft or mishandling, a figure Wikipedia notes is open to question.

The 1955 theft is the best-known case. A block of four, positions 65, 66, 75 and 76, with a red guide line through its centre, belonged to the collector Ethel McCoy and was stolen from a stamp show at a hotel in Norfolk. The block was broken up:

• The two left-hand stamps, positions 65 and 75, surfaced in the 1970s as single stamps in auction catalogues and were recovered by the FBI.
• Position 76 turned up at the Spink USA auction house in April 2016.
• Position 66, the top right stamp of the block, has never been found.

A second theft ended better. Benjamin K. Miller's stamp, position 18, was stolen in 1977 and recovered in the early 1980s with damaged perforations. It was later the main exhibit in the Smithsonian National Postal Museum's Rarity Revealed exhibition from 2007 to 2009 (all Wikipedia).

This history is why a Jenny offered without a position number is treated with suspicion: the census tracks where each position is.

The $2,006,000 record is for the best example; most sell for far less. Recorded prices across the range:

• US$495,600: position 69, sold June 14, 2024 (invertedjenny.com)
• US$1,351,250: sold May 31, 2016 (Wikipedia)
• US$1,593,000: position 49, November 15, 2018 (Wikipedia)
• US$2,006,000: position 49 again, November 15, 2023, bought by the collector Charles Hack in New York (Wikipedia)
• US$2,970,000: the plate number block of four, October 2005. Its buyer, Bill Gross, later traded it to Donald Sundman of Mystic Stamp Company for a 1-cent Z grill (Wikipedia)

So a single Jenny in average condition is a mid-six-figure stamp, while the finest single and the plate block sit in the millions. Centring, gum and faults explain most of the gap, which is why every sale quotes the position number.

No. It is the most famous US stamp error, but with a hundred printed it is far from the rarest stamp.

• The British Guiana 1c magenta of 1856 is unique: only one is known. It sold at Sotheby's New York on June 8, 2021 for $8,307,000 (Wikipedia). See British Guiana 1c magenta.
• Only two 1-cent Z grills of 1868 are known, one of them in the New York Public Library. The privately owned one sold in June 2024 for about $4.4 million (Wikipedia). See Benjamin Franklin Z grill.

The Jenny's prices come from its fame as much as its scarcity: a hundred examples are enough for the stamp to be traded regularly, and each sale makes the news.

Research and drafting were assisted by AI, and every price, date and number on this page was checked against the sources listed below. Auction results name the house and date; dealer prices are asking prices on the named website in September 2026.

Genuine 1918 Inverted Jennys come up for sale at auction, not in shops, and the price depends on the individual stamp's faults. Three were sold by Siegel Auction Galleries in June 2024, and the census site invertedjenny.com, which Siegel runs, records each one:

• Position 20: $153,400, 27 June 2024. Its certificate notes a light horizontal crease at the top and no gum.
• Position 19: $247,800, 27 June 2024. Certificates from 1983 and 2024 both note tiny thins.
• Position 69: $495,600, 14 June 2024. Sound, previously hinged.
• Position 49: $2,006,000, November 2023. Never hinged, graded 95.

So in 2024 the entry price for a faulty but genuine Jenny was about $150,000, a sound hinged one cost about half a million, and the finest example cost four times that. Wikipedia records the same spread earlier: five examples offered at auction between January and September 2014 sold for $126,000 to $575,100.

No shop sells an original at a fixed price. A listing that offers one outside an auction, or without a position number and a certificate, is offering something else.

Because every Jenny is tracked by position, you can follow a single stamp through the market. Position 69, sound throughout, according to invertedjenny.com:

• 1969, Siegel: $33,000
• 1977, Siegel: $62,500
• 2000, Siegel: $170,500
• 2002, Shreves: $132,000
• 2015, Siegel: $345,000, bought by William H. Gross
• 2024, Siegel: $495,600, sold from the Gross collection

Two points stand out. Prices did not only go up: the 2002 sale was below the 2000 one. And the whole sheet of 100 cost William T. Robey $24 at the post office in 1918; he sold it days later for $15,000.

A faulty stamp moves more slowly. Position 63, recorded with a blind perforation and a thin, sold for $2,940 in 1959 and $79,500 in 1996, well below sound examples of the same years.

The invertedjenny.com census lists every position with the year it last sold, its gum and its faults. The gum codes are:

• NH: never hinged
• OG / OGph: original gum; OGph means the gum has been photographed
• POG: partial original gum
• DOG: disturbed original gum
• NG: no gum
• RG: regummed

The fault notes are the ones that set price: thin, crease, reperforated, repaired tear, blind perforation. A handful of stamps carry a numeric grade, from 30 up to 95.

Check three things against the census before paying: that the position number matches the stamp in the photograph, that the recorded faults match the certificate, and that the last sale date makes sense. Some positions have not been seen in many years, and the site asks owners of those to register them; a stamp offered with no census history at all needs particular care.

The affordable Jenny is the 2013 reissue. On 22 September 2013 the Postal Service issued a souvenir sheet of six $2 stamps reproducing the inverted design, so each sheet had a face value of $12. They are modern postage and are worth about face value.

The scarce 2013 item is the sheet with the plane the right way up. The Postal Service printed 100 of them and sealed them in envelopes to be found at random; one sold at Siegel in June 2014 for $51,750 including a 15 per cent buyer's premium. In 2015 the Postal Service's Inspector General found that only 77 of the promised 100 upright sheets had been distributed (all Wikipedia).