Art: Precious Red Paper

A backward crown colony is British Guiana, sprawling just east of Venezuela over an area of South American forests, rivers and seacoast almost as large as Great Britain. But in 1856 British Guiana was even more backward than it is today. Georgetown, its capital, did not then boast two 40-bed hotels. That year the colonists ran out of stamps, printed a small issue on a newspaper press to tide them over until the arrival of a shipment of regular stamps from England. Only one stamp of that issue is known to exist today. It is the most valuable stamp in the world.

In 1873, a 14-year-old Georgetown boy named Vernon Vaughan found a frayed magenta 1¢ British Guiana stamp on an old family letter. More as a favor to the youngster than anything else, a collector named Neil R. McKinnon bought it for six shillings. Ten years later McKinnon sold his entire collection to Thomas Ridpath of Liverpool for $600. By that time the 1¢ British Guiana stamp had become known and Count Phillipe la Renotiere von Ferrari, biggest stamp collector in Europe, bought it from Ridpath for $750. In 1922 the Ferrari collection was sold in Paris. The late Arthur M. Hind of Utica, N. Y. bought the famed stamp for $32,500, offered it as a present to Philatelist George V. The King of England graciously declined to accept it.

Last week it became known that if King George wants to be the only man in the world to own a “British Guiana, 1856, 1¢ magenta,” it will cost him no less than $50,000. That is the price now set on the stamp by Philatelist Hind’s widow, Mrs. Pascal Costa Scala, who last spring married a monument salesman who called to sell a tombstone for her husband’s grave. Mrs. Scala announced last week that she would shortly take her valuable sliver of red paper to London’s Royal Philatelic Society where prospective purchasers will have a chance to examine it.

Last week another stamp, not yet issued, from another British crown colony, made philatelic news. Captain the Hon. Bede Edmund Hugh Clifford. Governor of the Bahamas, announced that he intended using an underwater color photograph taken by U. S. Submarine Photographer John Ernest Williamson as decoration for a new airmail stamp. Should The Crown’s presses break down when his new stamp was being printed, he might produce one or two stamps which would eventually rival the 1¢ British Guiana’s value. But it seemed more likely that the new Bahamian stamps would retain only their nominal value despite the fact that the first batch of letters bearing the airmail stamps will be sent from the submerged Williamson “photosphere.”