Original subtitles

Back in 1856,

this British Guiana stamp was worth one penny,

and in 1970 it was bought for $284,000.

Today, this one-of-a-kind was sold again,

and as Gerald Harrington reports,

it was for a whole lot more than that.

[Harrington] The stamp auction drew nearly

a thousand collectors and investors,

and bidding was brisk on most of the 424 lots auctioned off.

The stamp that promised to draw the most attention and money

was the one-of-a-kind British Guiana one-center.

Pennsylvania collector Irwin Weinberg paid a record $280,000

for the British Guiana ten years ago.

He said he bought it as a hedge against inflation

and that inflation is here.

As the sale drew near,

Weinberg was philosophical about parting with his stamp.

A postage stamp is not a human being.

And uh, you really have to be reasonable,

and you've had your pleasure.

And, uh, who knows?

Uh, I'm not, I'm not young, but I'm not really old.

It's not impossible that someday I might own it again.

[man] I think that in a lifetime,

if you have more than one great idea,

uh, you'd probably go down as a genius.

I only ever had one great idea.

That was it.

[music plays]

[Neil Steinberg] The idea of stamps is that they were

your introduction to the world,

And that great men--

you know, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a stamp collector.

The vibrant activity of active men

when they weren't traveling the world, climbing peaks,

we're collecting stamps from the great nations.

I think it speaks to the yearning

for the past that people have.

When I started, I was a little boy in Berea, Ohio, you know, in the '60s,

and you go to Woolworth's and they have those packages,

you know, 500 stamps of the world or whatever,

and you start to get them and sort them

and see the ones you like,

and you have the big generic book of world stamps.

You get your little hinges and you put them in,

and it's a very controlled task.

And when you think about being,

let's say eight or nine years old,

there's not a lot of worlds that you can control, really.

Your life is in someone else's hands,

you go to school, and so it's, it's, it's the first

sort of private, interior life

that a child can have, at least for me.

And as I got to be 10 and 12,

I would then go off to the department stores,

which in Cleveland were May Company and Higbee's and Halle's,

and they had these wonderful stamp departments.

[news reporter] What's the product? It's one that holds

enrapturing fascination for the more than 12,000,000 Americans

who enjoy the nation's most popular hobby, stamp collecting.

So avidly do these hobbyists pursue their avocation that

a whole industry has developed for the purpose of cataloging,

expertizing, reporting, buying, selling

and otherwise dealing in or with posting stamps.

I was always very daunted by the expanse of it.

I was never going to buy, I didn't have a ton of money.

I'm a child, right? I had a paper route.

But, at the time, it was this wonderful place where you can

pay money and get these stamps that you saw in Scott's

that was so wonderful to have,

and you would aspire to that and that's why you were working.

My grandfather, Sam, was a sign painter in the Bronx,

and he had the storied, at least in my family,

stamp collection with sheets of Winged Globes

and things that he'd collected in New York in the '20s and '30s

that was sold after he died.

And it was sort of the original sin of my family

that my vile Uncle Morty sold my grandfather's stamp collection

to pay for his son's crass Waldorf Astoria bar mitzvah in 1964.

And the funny thing is, there were parts of that collection

that weren't-- literally, weren't nice enough to sell,

and somehow found their way to me in big sorts of envelopes.

And so I had these first-day covers from

the Famous American Series of 1940,

the whole set of them. And they were nice,

and they just weren't extraordinarily valuable.

The major thing I did was I collected Israeli First Day Covers,

because I grew up, you know, in '67,

the big war, the Six Day War.

And so, uh, Israeli covers not only have a cache in the corner,

like a First Day cover would have here,

but Israeli stamps have a little tab,

like a decorative tab along the bottom,

and so you would have these tabs stamps on their cover.

And there was... I always liked covers because you could

see more of the history of the stamps.

Somehow when the stamp was by itself on an album,

it seemed kind of lost and alone.

Part of stamp collecting is the thrill of communications,

in the sense that this was how messages were conveyed,

and these messages had gone aboard

the Macon or the Graph Zeppelin.

I love Zeppelin's as a child, I didn't own any.

The only Zeppelin stamps I had with those cheap Germans stamps

that they had, Zeppelin series.

But, of course, I always aspired

to the three American air mail Zeppelin stamps,

the 65 cent, the $1.30, and the 2.60.

You never forget this stuff.

And I would look through Linn's Stamp News, I was a subscriber,

and it just was like this whole little, you know--

I was delivering papers, and I was taking the money,

and I was buying stamps and coins with them.

I was never like a value guy where I was trying to, uh,

where I was trying to get the most expensive stamps

and have them appreciate it and all that sort of stuff.

That wasn't what I was trying to do as a child.

I was trying to scratch my itch to get the stamps

that I could get my hands on.

If you had tapped me on the shoulder

and asked me what I was doing,

I guess I would say that I was a stamp collector,

and I was building my collection.

It became a sign of elder-hood,

of some infirm guy in his shawl with his tongs, you know,

tending to his fixation.

When you look at images and advertising,

I don't think you ever see someone collecting stamps.

It's not a positive image, which is a shame.

You know, I write a column four days a week,

and, uh, and... it, uh...

and it didn't print out the second one.

I can just tell you about it.

It used to be a full page where

I would have different things in.

So I comment on the passing stories of the day,

and what happened is the USPS,

in a desperate attempt to keep afloat,

basically said that you can put anything you want on a stamp.

You can have your picture taken,

you can put your dog there and print it out

and it's a real good U.S. postage, and you stick it in.

And I kind of just said it was--

The headline was "Department of Bartered Dignity,"

where you know, if the idea was that this--

Why does being on a stamp mean anything?

Well, it's, it's, it's an honor,

and if anyone can do it, it kind of fits in perfectly

with the "prizes for everyone" aspect of modern life has sadly had.

It seemed to be eating the seed corn of the interest in stamps.

Okay, if stamps, in part, are interesting because

what the government chooses

to put on a stamp signifies something,

well, if anyone can put anything on a stamp,

that probably signifies something, too,

but not something good.

And how could you collect them?

You only have 24 hours in a day that never expands.

And when you look at the demands on people...

that my kid can sit down and learn to fly and pilot his,

you know, his plane on an enormous beautiful TV

and spend all day doing that,

or playing basketball, which he does,

and just say, "Hey, no, no, no, no,

there's a basketball series of stamps that Malta did in 1974,"

that just doesn't work anymore, you know.

So, I can't sit here and say to you,

well, stamps are this fabulous porthole into the world

that people should have returned to when there's

so much more effective porthole that they are turning to.

You don't have to force them at all.

I do think that when we're learning with the death of newspapers

that, you know, the things we thought were vital

turned out to be just expendable activities.

I don't want to over romanticize things,

so I don't think that if this, if this hobby fades,

that it's going to represent

some sort of signal lost to humanity.

[Douglas Weisz] I would be crushed if there weren't stamp shows anymore,

or organized philately,

or the American Philatelic Society.

Philately and postal history and the mail tells our history.

We're missing just yet another opportunity

to learn something and connect with each other

if... if it disappears.

I really think it matters a lot to a lot of people.

It matters to me.

Before you had stamps, you would write your letter,

and you would fold it up

and then you take another piece of paper

and you would cover up that letter

and seal it with a wax seal.

You could send them prepaid,

or you could send them postage due,

and the receiver could refuse it

but would pay for the postage rate.

So the first envelope was in the 1830s,

um, and they weren't widely used

because if you use two pieces of paper

in the beginning it was more money.

History and stamp collecting are intertwined inextricably.

Without history,

you can't really be interested in stamps,

and stamps tell our history.

The most fabulous piece of postal history

that I personally have ever handled was a stamped letter

from Samuel Maverick to his son Nathaniel in Barbados in 1651.

The first known letter from the Colonies outbound

and the first known letter inbound to Barbados.

Maverick, the first settler of Boston,

had the first home on Noodle Island,

which is now Logan Airport.

The saying, "He's quite a maverick,"

comes from Samuel Maverick.

It's awe-inspiring, actually,

to hold history like that in your hands.

I feel like a custodian of these things, not an owner,

and it's a responsibility,

it's a huge responsibility to handle that.

It's why people collect stamps and covers.

It's to learn about our history.

I'm really into New Orleans,

so the more kind of things that you show on your cover

that make me feel like I'm here, the happier I am.

This is a two-sided cover

from the Roosevelt Hotel in the '60s.

I think this was a $10 purchase, but on the back of this cover,

you see fishing in Lake Pontchartrain on the Gulf,

here's a swordfish, horse racing,

the Sazerac Bar, which was very famous.

Of course Mardi Gras festival right here,

and there's their hotel right there, the Roosevelt.

The Sugar Bowl,

New Orleans is famous for the Sugar Bowl even today.

And this is back in the '60s.

You have a whole a history and a display of New Orleans

on one... on one cover.

I have no family, um, really.

Not that they're not alive, I just have no family.

It's given me a community that has become my friends

and people that mean a lot to me.

I learned about what they were collecting.

I learned about them,

and they were willing to share their lives with me,

so they've really become my... my community.

I'm really worried without things like philately

and euchre night on Tuesdays,

that we're losing something,

we're losing our culture here in the United States,

and I don't think you can replace that

with Facebook or Twitter or any of that.

I think that our lack of connection to each other

is breeding fear and anger and misunderstanding.

People don't go to stamp shows

to collect the things that you find there.

They go to stamp shows to get together, to be social.

I think it just gives everyone a familiarity,

something in common,

a jumping-off point so that they can have a community.

I think we need more community,

and I think philately is perfect.

[music plays]

[news reporter] Crowds of philatelists, stamp collectors to you,

attend the annual show of the Michigan Stamp Club.

Among them these two winners of the World's Fair beauty contests.

They wanted to get posted on postage,

that is, valuable postage like this.

[music plays]

[Jim Forte] I don't know why I collect,

and I don't know why anybody collects.

When I got started, it was in the middle of the 1960s,

and the world was a much larger place than it is now.

Probably my earliest collecting memories

is my father used to have a giant jug of change,

and back in the days when you were five and six years old

and you'd get up at 7:00 or 6:00 in the morning,

I would sometimes go take that jar of change

and put all the coins in date order,

and so you clearly, you know, you clearly

have that kind of mentality, you know?

There's definitely a collecting gene, a collecting personality,

and so, you know, stamps seem to fill it in.

And it really fulfilled the need to make order out of chaos.

And a friend of mine had a collection,

and I remember looking at his stamps,

and especially looking at some of the, you know,

engraved British Commonwealth stamps

from places like Malta and Cyprus,

and it just seemed so exotic.

I got an album and I got

a H.E. Harris big bag of worldwide stamps

and was flummoxed on how to get them off of the paper.

I mean, it was a big learning experience.

H.E. Harris sent out this colorful flyer

for this citation album,

and they showed this and it was open to a page of Angola

where they had dozens of these colorful stamps.

And you know, there was no point at that time

where I could afford that album or those stamps,

and I would look at it, and they always just...

just sort of liked them.

I mean, it just filled a special place.

And I don't know why.

H.E. Harris published a great amount

of number of things on collecting,

and one of the things they suggested

was forming a stamp club.

Well, the problem is I might have known 10 or 20 people,

and there might have been one or two stamp collectors.

So that really didn't make it feasible to start a stamp club.

So, it wasn't very, it wasn't-- it was never a social thing.

I mean, it was definitely something that I did on my own.

I've always been someone who was more to themselves,

and stamps worked well on a solitary basis.

I mean, I didn't do too much with it

for the years I was in college.

Well, that's not true.

I got back into it after a couple years when I realized

college was a lot easier than everybody said it was gonna be.

But I always assumed I'd be doing something else.

It would be like most people, would be a hobby business,

but when I tried to make it in the real world,

I found out I wasn't very successful.

After, you know, running through

a whole series of different jobs,

each one less successful than the last,

what was left was buying and selling stamps.

I mean, the service businesses is very difficult.

You know, unless you're the kind of--

unless you're a good salesman of yourself and of your service.

A business where you're selling product,

I mean, the bottom line is,

that you're selling the same product as everybody else.

It becomes difficult to differentiate yourself.

And quite frankly, what I've always seen

is the people that are successful

are the people that other people want to do business with.

I remember once I tried looking up--

I had some spare time, and I did a Google search

on this psychology of collecting.

Turns out that all I saw was, you know, was, um...

What's the right word? Uh...

It was only about people who had problems.

So it wasn't very pleasant to read that. [laughing]

[indistinct chatting]

I'm not what you would call a "people person",

There's no question that there is such a thing as emotional intelligence,

and mine is pretty low,

But at the end of the day,

what's nice is when you're dealing with the collectible,

when the product is what's important

and it differentiates you from the next person,

you know, it allows you to overcome

your lack of emotional intelligence.

It makes a person feel good to have these items

and to have these items in this particular order,

or to have the items, you know, in a particular manner.

The, you know, to find my--

I think I don't-- How can you tell...

It's hard to suggest what particular emotion a person gets,

but there's no question that the collecting gene,

you know, is an emotional gene.

I never get tired of talking about stamps or Zeppelins

or the people in the hobby or stamp shows

or where I've been or anything else

that relates to stamps and mail.

[music plays]

My mother always tells the story:

I didn't play with dolls in the traditional way.

Instead I lined them up on a shelf,

and every day I rearranged them.

I collected coins with pennies and looked for dates.

I collected stamps, put them in a box, collected sea shells.

I just collected everything,

and as I would go to various places where I could buy things,

coin shows, stamp shows,

antique shows, flea markets, whatever,

what I found was the exhibitors were always the dealers,

except when I went to a stamp show.

At a stamp show, the collector was the exhibitor.

They could put their stuff on display,

and that's what really excited me.

When I was a teenager,

my grandfather gave me some photographs of Zeppelins.

I had no idea what a Zeppelin was.

First thing I did was I went to the public library,

and I looked up a very classic book about the Graf Zeppelin,

and I just read it so eagerly,

and I just was amazed

that this entire part of history existed,

and I didn't know anything about it.

So I started to look for everything I could about Zeppelins.

And of course I'm on a teenager budget, so what could I find?

I could find some picture postcards,

could find a couple inexpensive stamps,

I could find an occasional, maybe, bookmark

or something that wasn't too costly,

but every piece I've found added to this bigger, growing story.

And when I found out that they carried mail,

and I actually bought my first piece of mail

for a couple of dollars and held it in my hands,

it was the first time I held something

that had been on a Zeppelin,

and it just, just grabbed me

and it's held me tight ever since.

And perhaps the highlight moment

when I was only, like, 21 years old

is I bought a piece of mail

that survived the crash of the Hindenburg,

and it was like a major, major acquisition

at that stage in my life.

When many people are out looking to buy a car,

I was looking to buy a piece of mail from the Hindenburg.

There were over 17,000 pieces of mail on the Hindenburg.

After the disaster,

they've found only about 200 burnt pieces of mail

that survived in the wreckage,

and they put their hands in and they grabbed those out

and then they sorted through them

and made lists of the people who are the addressees,

and then they had to figure out,

how are we going to return this to these people?

And then they went back and found a few more pieces.

So these burnt pieces of mail

that survived the first disaster ever caught on film

are just among the greatest treasures in our hobby.

So I actually started out buying, for several dollars,

uh, pieces of mail when other people might have

spent that couple dollars to buy a thousand stamps in a packet.

Later, I actually started some stamp albums,

because what I found was when I was meeting other philatelists,

they were so engrossed with their stamp albums,

they kind of motivated me.

For me, stamps have opened the door.

When I travel worldwide, I meet such exciting people,

I don't know how I could ever meet these people in my life

if it wasn't through philately.

And I can actually go to a stamp show in a foreign country

and know over a hundred people,

and they invite me into their homes.

I get all kinds of experiences in life.

It's that getting off the beaten track

and having the exposure to things

that you just don't even know are there.

You can't even put them on your bucket list

because it's only through the stamps taking you there

that you find out things even exist.

So they have truly been a door opener for me in my life.

I have a Ph.D. in American History,

I have a lifelong devotion to the hobby,

I have lifelong experience in philately,

and all that knowledge pulled together

made me an ideal candidate to come and be in charge

of our nation's stamp collection,

as the curator of our nation's stamp collection.

That is this collection of every citizen of the United States.

And we have over 6,000,000 items.

The collection is well over a hundred years old.

I'm only the tenth curator hired

to be in charge of this collection.

So it's a great honor, but it's great fun,

because, you know, I get to look at like,

6,000,000 items and say, okay,

what here deserves to be written about, researched,

used in an exhibit, brought out to the public in new ways?

I absolutely believe in the collector's gene.

I also believe people can learn to collect.

I think people can adopt their interests in a variety of ways,

but I think there's a large group of the population

where they are driven toward collecting.

It's a way that they define themselves,

but it's a way that they take the skills they have

and the interest they have and the energy they have

and they channel it into one direction

in such a positive way.

And the great thing in our hobby is,

when you meet another person with this gene,

you don't have to justify who you are,

why you do what you do or how you do what you do,

we get it right away!

Just start, just think of something,

something you like, something of interest to you.

Is it the American flag? Is it the USA?

Have you always wanted to go to Chile?

Have you, uh, do you like tea pots?

It doesn't matter what the subject is,

it doesn't matter where it is,

it doesn't matter the historical period.

It doesn't matter, because I guarantee you

there is something in philately for you.

[music plays]

It's a passion, you know,

and if you're lucky enough in life, you'd develop a passion.

You'll find something that you just,

you just can't live without.

It was my dad pretty much that got me

into stamp collecting as a young, young boy.

He would buy stamps for me,

but also he was in the Navy, so he would receive letters

and correspondence from friends all over the world.

And so, of course, you know, we would collect,

cut the stamps off the envelopes

and talk about the countries they came from

and then put them in the album.

And then when I went away to school and went to university,

you put that sort of thing away.

About five years, I was in my mid-20s, I would guess,

I was in an accident, I hurt my neck,

and I ended up having to be in bed for about a month.

And after the first week, I was going stir-crazy of boredom

and remembered I had this old collection in the closet

and pulled this thing out and started looking at it.

And, as opposed to when you're a young person,

you sort of just collect randomly items from around the world,

whatever comes in the mail, things like that.

And obviously when I went back to

this collection and started looking at it,

I was viewing it with a, you know, with adult eyes

and from a totally different perspective.

I think the first thing that attracted me

was simply the artistry.

The engraving is absolutely magnificent.

And as you look closer at this stuff,

you start realizing how remarkable it is.

And what happened is that you...

you start... small,

and you just collect what you like.

So I started collecting the general stamps of Great Britain.

And while the modern stamps told more stories

because of the subject matter than the early stamps,

the Victorian ones, in particular,

had this depth and variety

that I started becoming addicted to.

Prior to 1840, the recipient of the mail

had to pay the cost of the postage.

And there's a-- there's an apocryphal story,

whether or not it's true, I don't know,

but a man named Rowland Hill,

who was in England, an Englishman,

saw a young lady being delivered a letter by a postman,

and she took the letter and she looked at it,

and then she gave it back to the postman and said,

"No, I'm not paying for it, but you know, thank you anyway."

A shilling for the letter indeed!

You can tell the Post Office to take it back to London

and I hope it costs them a shilling!

And off he went.

And so Rowland Hill walked up to the young lady and said,

"Well, you know, what's going on here?"

And she said, "Oh, well, it's a letter for my boyfriend,

"and, uh, on the envelope, he writes sort of secret codes

"to me to let me know that everything's okay,

"and I can look at the envelope, know he's oaky

and I don't have to pay anything for it."

Rowland thought about this for a long time.

As I say, this is an apocryphal story.

I mean, there are a whole host of other reasons

why postage stamps were invented,

but that's one of the stories behind it.

The population has increased by almost one-third

in the last 30 years,

and yet there are no more letters

sent through the post then when I was a boy.

I tell you, sir, as a commercial undertaking,

the Post Office is a failure.

Post is too expensive, people can't afford it.

Now my plan is to sell to the public some kind of a mark

which they could put on the letters themselves

to show that they've been paid for.

A printed cover,

a small sticky label.

In fact, a kind of a stamp.

The Penny Postal Reform Act of 1840

changed the way that mail was delivered,

and changed-- for the first time, mail was prepaid.

And to do this, they decided that you--

he invented the concept of using a stamp.

[man] Rowland Hill's plan was adopted,

and penny postage came into course.

Until the stamps were ready,

people handed in their letter with a penny.

The stamps were urgently needed to simplify the work.

The treasury held a competition,

inviting the public to send in designs for a stamp.

Over 2,700 entries were received.

None of them was considered satisfactory.

So Rowland Hill, in collaboration with a firm of printers,

made this design.

[Ian] In Britain, everyone knows of the Penny Black,

which, of course, was the world's first postage stamp.

So because Britain was the first country

to come up with the idea of the stamp,

Britain remains the only country in the world

that doesn't have to put its name on a stamp.

Every other country in the world does, Britain doesn't.

But there is always a picture of the reigning monarch.

I was collecting Great Britain, and I'd reached the point

where the only material that was left in the catalog as it were

or in the spaces in my album was material I couldn't afford.

It was expensive or it was rare.

And so I started looking at what was called the Back of the Book.

These are officials and other types of stamps

that are not specifically used for postage,

and there's a whole series of stamps that were used,

were called overprints.

And these were basic stamps that had, for one reason or other,

printing done upon them to be used for different purposes

or for different rates.

And these more affordable.

And I started filling them in

and actually completed one section.

It's called the British Offices in China,

which basically is Hong Kong stamps of the 1900s

that had the word "China" printed on them.

[music plays]

I was at a stamp show one day and was talking to a dealer

and he said, "Well, you know, you've got one of these, right?"

And he pulls out this stamp,

and it's a one-cent stamp, one-penny stamp,

and it's, uh-- the crown is broken.

I said, "No, I don't have this."

And so he started spouting off, "Well, you know,

"you've got the inverted watermark and you've got this."

And I said, "Well, no. What are you talking about?"

And he said, "Well, how are you collecting?

Are you using one of the great reference works?"

And I said, "Well, I'm using the standard catalog,

the Scott catalog."

And he sort of rolled his eyes a little bit,

and you could see I haven't figured out...

I really didn't know an awful lot.

And he said, "Well, you should call the American Philatelic Society

and they've got, if you're interested in this, they have information."

It was extraordinary, it was eye-opening,

because suddenly I realized that, you know--

I barely begun to scratch the surface

of what I was actually collecting.

There was so much more to it.

It wasn't just the art, it was the story of the stamps

and how they were used and the rates that they paid

and why they were even overprinted in the first place.

And the more I started to sort of dig into this,

the more I found out that actually wasn't known.

And suddenly the light bulbs went off.

I mean this was the coolest bit.

When you, when you find something

and it's not in the book,

it's not in a catalog, it's not in a journal.

And you suddenly realize you've found something

that nobody's found before.

And it just...

Well, you're screwed. [laughs]

You're absolutely doomed at this point,

because suddenly this passion hits you.

There was something that only I knew

or I'd figured out or found

and that you can share with somebody else and say,

"Hey, look, you know, this is really cool stuff."

This is the Broken Crown.

That right there

is the stamp that started the whole thing off, you know?

Why? Because the crown is missing,

Half the crown's cut off.

Seems basic, seems simple,

but for some reason, that set this whole thing in motion.

You know, so from what was one page of stamps,

you know, it turned into book after book after book.

And I'm not stopping anytime soon.

This was the Broken Crown, which was the first major error

to be discovered on these stamps.

What is interesting is, as I said earlier about

how different printings of the stamps were different colors,

what makes this really fun is that we know

there were three printings of the one penny.

So the first printing was this sort of regular brown color,

and there's the broken crown.

So we know it appeared on the first printing.

The second printing was this sort of reddish brown color.

And there's the broken crown.

So we know it was still on the second printing.

But this is where it gets really cool.

This is the third printing, it's the dark-brown.

Exactly the same position.

The stamp is exactly the same position.

The crown has been fixed.

So now we know that at some point

between that printing and that printing,

they fixed it.

That's awesome!

So what that led to, of course, was the trip

to the British Museum and the British Library,

where I sat and went through microfilms

for days and days and days

trying to figure out what happened on this stuff.

Who reported it? How did this happen?

And I came across some correspondence

from the postmaster in Shanghai,

you know, in-- I think it was 1920, 1921,

writing back and saying, "Hey, you know,

"we just discovered this.

"How come you guys never noticed this?"

And, uh, it was this little postman or postmaster in Shanghai

was the first one to report this back.

So the printers, you know, the post office got annoyed,

and the printers fixed it.

You know, suddenly you've got this whole story,

all over one stamp.

Brilliant.

There's a stamp that I've wanted since I was a little boy,

and it has nothing to do with either Queen Victoria stamps

or British offices in China,

but it's called the Tyrian Plum.

It's an iconic British stamp,

and I've wanted it my whole life, basically.

And one finally came up for sale,

and I had to, uh...

had to do a lot of borrowing and figuring out how to do it.

Oh, I'm going to be so much trouble

if people find out how much I spent.

No, it's...

Yeah, it was, I think, $157,000, so...

You know, you read about the Bond villains

that want to steal a Mona Lisa, and they're going to be a--

they want it because they're going to keep it in the basement

and look at it, and you think, God, what a freak!

And I totally get that,

I completely get that person now.

You know? [laughing]

[music plays]

It has an absolutely unique color.

I mean, early on, the big question was,

how does another country know that a stamp is valid?

And one of the ways that they did it

was that they color-coded stamps.

You'll note, particularly in the United States stamps,

all of the three-cent stamps

that were issued back in the '40s and '50s,

they're all purple.

That was so other countries and agencies

could identify that the stamps were valid.

So this was sort of used commonly throughout the world.

When they issued the two-pence, the Tyrian Plum,

it's just a unique color.

I'm not sure that that color has ever been used again on British stamps.

But it's just-- There's something about this piece

that's just iconic and unique and different

It's just always...

always affected me.

This is something that just...

I always wanted it.

There's really not a lot to say about it.

Just... ugghh. [laughs]

[music plays]

[Stephen Heller] I think everybody collects something...

even if they collect nothing.

You want to show them off.

You have gotten them through some kind of travail,

some kind of struggle or challenge.

You want to show that you have them, that you own them.

The display is very important,

because the display says who you are creatively.

Collecting is a obsessive activity.

The greater you invest in the collection,

the more you invest in detriment of your mental health.

That desire is to fulfill a goal,

to fill one's life with something

that is beyond themselves,

to fill one's life with memories

that may or may not belong to them.

[Jackie Tohn] It's such a huge part of my family,

and that it was, like, something that we could connect on.

And it's just a really cool window

into something you never knew about.

[David Feldman] Things from way far-off lands you never heard of,

with names of far-off lands you never heard of.

There's a romance, I would say a romance.

I wasn't realizing the animal was growing,

my heart was growing.

[Carlos Vergara] It's something that is a direct tie-in to my homeland.

It's a fly-on-the-wall-view of history

that is hard to obtain in any other way.

[Alex Haimann] Mail was the best way for me to personally connect

with someplace beyond just seeing a picture of something,

but rather to hold something from that place,

to have a connection to that day and time.

[Michael Russem] I don't know how people really exist without collecting.

I don't know what they do with their time

when there's nothing to do.

How do they procrastinate?

I guess maybe they watch television, which is fine.

[pipe inhaling and exhaling]

I remember it like it was yesterday.

Two years ago, I had a client.

Still have the client, but I had a client.

And he wanted a particular stamp.

The stamp catalogued £5,000.

It was the last stamp needed to complete a particular country,

and it is the heart and soul of that country,

and it is massively under-cataloged.

It has been since I started buying them

when they catalogued $500 apiece, years and years ago,

Now they're £5,000. Still too cheap, in my opinion.

I said, "Fine, I can present you the stamp, it's very difficult,

"it's the key to the whole subject,

"it's the only stamp we have been able to find,

and I want $25,000 for it."

He said, "I'll think about it." That's fine.

A month goes by, and I get a catalog from overseas.

And it is a beautiful, beautiful,

specialized collection of that particular subject

of which this stamp belonged.

Must have taken him 30, 40 years to put together.

I get to the place for the key stamp, it ain't there.

That doesn't surprise me.

The following week, I'm working at my desk.

Maureen says, "Mr. J. Worthy Pfellfelfinger is on the line."

So I picked up the phone.

I didn't say hello, I didn't say how are you?

I picked up the phone, I said,

"He didn't have it, did he?"

That's all I said.

Pause. Then he starts to laugh outrageously.

He said, "You're right, he didn't have it."

I said, "What did I tell you?" [laughs]

He said, "Do you still have it?"

I said, "Yes, I do."

He said, "I'll take it." I said, "Thank you."

Sent him the stamps. Sold it him for 25,000.

While I had him on the line,

I said, "Now, let's have some fun."

"You and I know that this man understood

"his subject very well.

Yet he didn't have the stamp."

So I said to my friend,

"How many times in the last 25 years

did he have a chance to buy the stamp?"

I said he had four chances to buy that stamp

in the last 25 years, on either side of the Atlantic.

And four times he walked into the auction room,

sat down, prepared to buy the last stamp

he needed to complete the subject.

Four times in a row, he left the sales room

without buying the stamp because he wouldn't

make the commitment necessary to secure the stamp.

And four times in a row,

guess who the buyer was.

So there are three copies in the vault.

Now, you have to have the strength of your convictions

if you're going to trash a catalog figure.

But you have to come to some conclusions after 50 years.

I took it away from him four times in a row,

with malice in my heart and pushed him and pushed him

and pushed him and pushed and pushed

until he couldn't see straight.

Because I said the stamp is infinitely more important

than the catalog tends to indicate.

At the end of the day, as far as I'm concerned,

I put my money where my mouth is.

If I'd been desperately wrong in the last 50 years

on all these kinds of decisions that I have to make from time to time,

I would've been out of business 40 years ago.

I don't have to have a client to buy that stamp.

I know exactly how it fits into the firmament

of the particular collection.

My father got me a stamp album,

and I outgrew it rather quickly

and bought a bigger one about that big,

and for about four or five years,

I collected stamps from all over the world,

which gave me a little bit of an idea

of what some countries were like

and what sorts of things they had.

Eventually it got so fat and it got too big,

it got too big to handle,

and I decided that I wasn't going to collect

anything my father was collecting.

Don't ask me why.

I had a particular proclivity for Zanzibar,

and I decided that the British Empire was too big to handle.

So I decided I'll take a chunk of it.

And to me, there were more exotic and interesting things

in Africa than there was anywhere else in the Empire.

To this day, I feel just as strongly.

I proceeded to build a collection of British Africa

for the reigns of Victoria and George V.

The collection stops in 35' on the basis of the fact

that the material after '35 is dirt common,

could be bought on any street corner or anytime you want,

and all the really rare and exotic and interesting things

are in the 19th and early 20th century.

Someone once said that one person in seven

in Switzerland was a stamp collector.

Well, that's an awfully big percentage of the proletariat.

Nothing like what we have here.

It's still a giant market here.

But, uh, it is as I can divine

from doing shows all over Hell's Half-Acre,

it can be wildly addictive.

Ask me. [laughs]

I'm still-- I'm still hooked on it, seriously,

after more than 50 years.

Collecting-mania, whether it's stamps, coins, antiquities,

comic books, trading cards or, or whatever...

runs hot and heavy in many people's, uh, makeup.

At the end of the day, a dealer

needs to learn about valuations on the basis

of his own experience with his clients,

especially when the client is prepared

to spend serious money on nice material.

It's not a question of whether I'm purveying the stamp

at 50% of Scott or 250% of Scott, the stamp's the thing.

At the end of the day, when you put it on the table,

the response is usually, "Jesus, George,

do you know how long I've looked for that stamp?"

I say, "You and the other 17 guys before you."

You all had the same problem.

I studied your problems

and overlaid your problems

with a large group of other people

who were also serious players.

And lo and behold,

certain truisms came to the surface.

Not because of one man's problem,

but because of many people's problem with the same stamp,

which is why there are a lot of stamps that I buy,

that are scarce,

that I don't necessarily have a want-list for.

I have always liked rare things in the field,

because it has always been my feeling

that the greatest stamps in philately are dirt cheap,

irrespective of what they sell for.

A firm just sold a very nice example

of the Two Penny Post Office Mauritius.

A very famous stamp,

a coveted stamp of which there's about a dozen copies,

although many of them are institutionalized,

so there's probably three or four

that possibly could float around

if they were available-- it brought a million dollars.

And that's one of the top five or six stamps...

on the planet.

Now, if you and I walk over to Sotheby's

and they're having an Old Masters' sale,

and they're selling a painting by Rembrandt's

third cousin twice removed,

how much is that going to cost us?

Millions and millions of dollars.

If it was a real Rembrandt,

we couldn't touch it with a barge pole.

So, as far as I'm concerned,

paying a $1,000,000 for a Tuppence Mauritius

is a goddamn gift.

Because it is one of the more revered objects on the planet

as far as philately is concerned.

I have always felt that great stamps, of all countries,

are very inexpensive in relation to objects

of that degree of scarcity and rarity

in other collecting fields.

Which is why I am very comfortable

buying very rare and exotic things because I respect them.

I respect them enough to put my own money into them

even if I don't necessarily have a client for it.

But when the client materializes,

as he does in the fullness of time,

you can certainly pull something off that's not available

anywhere in the world at this point.

You know, you have to be fortunate in stamp collecting

to, you know, to be at the right place at the right time.

You know, somebody looking, for instance,

for the one-cent Z-Grill

might be looking for a long time,

'cause I own it.

Why stamps? In my case it was because of my mother.

Um, she, she collected stamps,

but they were sheets of 100 U.S. commemoratives,

and she bought them at the post office.

She wasn't a stamp collector, but, um,

you know, in the late '30s and early '40s,

she bought pounds and pounds

and hundreds and hundreds of commemorative sheets

in order to send me to college.

She thought of it as an investment.

She told me about them, showed them to me,

and said, "We'll go to San Francisco, and, uh,

and this is your college tuition."

Surprise, surprise.

There were four dealers in San Francisco,

and I took them to each of the dealers.

They weren't worth the paper they're printed on.

In other words, a 3-cent hundred commemorative sheet

wasn't worth $3.

And so knowing that that wasn't what my mother had intended,

I didn't sell the stamps.

I took them home, and the look on her face

was of ultimate depression

because she counted on them appreciating

to send me to college.

My tuition was gone.

20, 30 years later when I, uh, you know,

began to have some money that was disposable,

I said, well, I'm gonna... I'm gonna, do this right.

I'm going to show my mom that she had the right idea,

she just bought the wrong stamps.

I started with my home country, the U.S.

That's what I collected as a kid.

A matter of fact, I still had my, uh very basic

U.S. collection with that one cent Colombian stamp in it.

And so I wanted to fill in the spaces,

you know, from the United States.

That's what-- That's what I knew.

You know, the presidents, the, uh, you know,

the national parks and all of the stamps

of the early, you know, 20th, uh... 20th century.

I think it was very fortunate

that between 1992 and 2004 or 5,

when ultimately I completed it, that I was able to do that

because that's a sort of a freak of a philately that you could

find a willing seller for exactly what you wanted to buy.

There's this misconception because Mr. Gross

isn't so much involved in the social world of stamps,

He's a little bit hidden from the world.

So they all think he's just somebody who was just spending money,

he has plenty of money and he just spends it.

In 1992, he was slowly buying.

He didn't know the right markets, uh, what to pay.

But then he saw the Ishikawa sale.

It was about a $10,000,000 collection at that time.

So we started with lot number one in the sale and he said,

"So what's that worth?" and I would tell him.

He said, "Do you think I should have it for my collection?"

I said, "Well, yeah, that one's very nice."

Lot number two. "No, I don't think you should have that.

There are better examples out there."

Lot number three. "What do you think that's worth?"

"Oh, that's 100,000." Lot number four.

So we went through the whole sale,

and in the end, we had millions of dollars

worth of bids ready.

And so I said, "What's your game plan?"

And he said, "Well, what do you mean, what game plan?

I said, "Well, people have a budget.

"They usually go, I'd rather go after these,

or I want these four items, or only spend up to $200,000."

But remember, now we had millions of dollars worth the bids.

He goes, "Well, hell, if I can buy it all, that'd be great!"

[William Gross] The Z-Grill was an interesting story in and of itself,

and that was done with the company Mystic

The stamp that was really exciting for our company

and for my family is the one-cent Z-Grill,

and in 1998, the stamp was coming up for sale.

And I remember when I got into stamps

and reading about the stamp and it was valued at $30,000.

And I thought, how can that be?

And I didn't understand that.

And then it sold for almost a $100,000

to Jerry Buss in the late '70s

and then sold to a fellow named Zoellner

for $400,000 in the '80s.

There's two known ones in the New York Public Library,

now in the Smithsonian,

and this was the other one that was available to collectors.

So it was really the key to a complete U.S. collection.

This is a stamp that was an experimental stamp,

putting an impression on those stamps

so that it could break the paper fibers

and ink would be absorbed in the paper,

and as a result, the stamp couldn't be counterfeited.

And the Z-Grill, put onto a variety of different stamps,

just survived in small, small quantity

on this one cent blue Benjamin Franklin stamp.

And we believe only two are known.

And for many people, that would be considered

the great rarity in American philately.

If you don't own that,

you can't have a complete 19th century collection.

I really wanted to own it,

and so I went to the auction in New York with my son,

who is 11 years old, and he had the bidding paddle,

and we approved it with the auctioneer.

And so he actually bid on the stamp,

and we bought it for $935,000.

Mystic had used the Z-Grill for three or four years

as a, um, an advertisement,

and they'd carry it around to all their displays and sales

at various, uh, you know, stamp functions in the country.

[chuckles] Definitely, yeah, I was

unnaturally attached to that stamp,

and that, uh, I just, I loved the owning it,

and I used to pull it out from time to time and look at it,

and it's just funny how this little piece of paper

could give me that much pleasure.

I wrote him. I wrote him a letter and said,

you know, your advertising is probably getting a little tired.

Wouldn't you like to, uh, you know,

exchange that for something more exciting?

A block of a Inverted Jenny's was coming up for sale.

I suggested to him ahead of time

than if I bought the inverted Jenny Block,

that would be a better advertising gimmick for him then the Z-Grill,

and I would exchange the Block for the, you know, the Z-Grill.

So that's how I got it.

It was a pretty well advertised exchange, I guess.

Um...

They're not looking at us, they're looking at the stamp.

Don, thank you very much. I appreciate it very much.

Thanks.

[applause]

Well, this was a key stamp for Mr. Gross

because it was the last stamp he needed to, uh,

achieve the title of having the most complete

U.S. stamp collection ever formed.

It was the last space,

and what it did, of course, was to complete the collection,

which was sort of like the last piece in the puzzle.

It's a very little piece.

And so it was more valuable to me than to him,

and I would probably agree that he got a good deal.

[chuckles]

Uh, I, uh, it was like...

I-I... It's hard to put it in words.

There was, like, some deep emotions going on,

and it just felt like, uh, that, that it was like

a passing of the guard,

that I was privileged to own this wonderful stamp

and then it went to a good home.

Here's our block.

And so a block is four stamps,

and a plate number is the number on the bottom

of the salvage underneath the stamp.

And that's used by the printers to track the different plates

that are used to print the stamp.

This is unique because the plate numbers

would have been trimmed off on the top of the sheet.

Because it was inverted,

this plate number showed up in the bottom salvage.

[music plays]

I loved the Z-Grill because it's the key to a unique

collection or a complete collection of U.S. stamps.

And so to own that stamp was a dream come true.

I never thought that I would, in a million years,

we'd own that stamp.

And then when we bought it and we had it,

it was such a special feeling.

A feeling that I wish I could have bottled

and then pull out from time to time to re-experience.

You don't want to hold on to them for 40 years

because that kills the market and kills the interest.

Not that everybody could accumulate a Z-Grill,

the one cent Z-Grill or an Inverted Jenny,

but you have to turn it over for the good of philately, I think.

I've done that with, uh, you know,

my Great Britain and UK collection.

I've done that with actually

almost all collections other than the U.S.

I've auctioned them off for charity

for, uh, you know, Doctors Without Borders,

for a number of charities that, you know,

the auction in New York about four years ago

with my classic UK collection,

you know, raised nine million bucks.

And so that was given back.

A number of, uh, wealthy collectors

now own a majority of the prizes.

I do think that's a little unfair,

and that's why I think it's incumbent

to turn it over,

to give it back.

I was about 10 years old or so,

and my brother knew I was thinking about stamp collecting,

because all the little kids did at that time,

and he bought me an edition of the Scott Catalog,

which is a book that prices all the stamps of the world.

Now, at that time it was a book of maybe 70 or 80 pages.

Today, it's a book of 200 pages,

each in six different volumes.

That's how stamps have mounted and grown.

And he gave me a little stamp album

to put the stamps in that I got my hands on.

When I was about 15 years old,

and I saved up $18,

and I took my $18 with me to New York,

and I found a stamp dealer

who sold me a whole box full of stamps,

because I always had a little entrepreneurial spirit about things.

Maybe I should find out how that business operated.

How I'm going to sell this box full of stamps?

So I wrote a little ad

describing the box and the stamps in it.

Priced it $18.75.

Well, apparently it turned a number of people on

because I got something like 10 to 20 orders.

So I go back to New York and see the same stamp dealer

and buy more stuff.

The stamp dealer said to me,

"What are you gonna do with all these names you got?"

I said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "Well, these were customers."

You now have developed them."

It was August of 1945,

and I did my first price list.

And as of last week, I'm up to number 3,630.

[music plays]

Right around 1970,

the Vietnam War was going on at a good clip.

Investing in what I call "paper gold"

might not be a bad idea.

So I got a half a dozen people together locally,

and we went out and bought stamps,

and I dominated the big auctions in New York,

buying the stamps,

like the famous stamp of the upside-down airplane.

I got a phone call at home, a local newspaper calling

saying that they had just got news that this rare stamp

was going to be sold at public auction

and was I going to be interested in it.

Was I going to buy the British Guiana stamp?

Well, I had seen it once before.

I was only 12 years old at the time.

I was at the New York World's Fair.

There it was, in a case of glass, the one-cent Magenta.

[man] Ladies and gentlemen,

before we go and sell lot number 279,

I would like to make a little announcement.

This is the British Guiana, one cent, black on magenta,

issued in 1856.

This is known as the world's most valuable stamp,

known as the most valuable object

for its size and weight in existence.

We hope to prove that shortly.

That night, I get out of my seat,

and I walked to the back of the room,

and I just didn't do anything

until it hit about 150,000 or so,

and then I put my hand up and just kept it up.

[man] At 260,000, at 260,000 I have,

this against you, ma'am, at 260,000.

At $280,000, in the far rear at $280,000.

At 280,000 I have, at 280,000.

Fair warning, this is the last call.

Sold to Mr. Irwin Weinberg at $280,000.

It was like a mob of mad men

coming right at me.

I was never so frightened in my life.

I couldn't believe where they were going.

They were coming to me!

The next morning, I thought to myself,

I'm going downstairs

and see what they say in the newspapers about it.

So I go to the newspaper stand and I said,

"Do you mind if I look at the New York Times for a minute?

I'm looking to see if there's something there."

I went all through the paper and didn't see a thing.

I looked in the business section,

the entertainment section, nothing. Hmm.

I put it back and said, "Thank you very much."

She said, "Excuse me, sir, but did you look at the front page?"

I said, "No." She said, "You better look at it."

I looked at it, turned it over and there I was.

Well, the British Guiana is a storied,

wonderful, storied stamp.

It was issued in 1856 in British Guiana

in a situation where the stamps that had been

produced in Britain for British Guiana were delayed.

And so the local post office had to produce their own stamps.

But the stamps they produced were so crude in the sense

that the postmaster said the postal clerks

really had to sign each stamp, initial it,

before delivering it in order to ensure it's a genuineness.

But the famous one-cent, the famous one-cent.

Well, it's unique.

Only a small number were produced of one-cents.

It's unknown how many there were needed at that point.

So it was used on newspapers,

people saved their letters inside envelopes,

you had stamps on envelopes,

but the wrappers around the newspaper were not saved,

and so there wasn't the same sort of opportunity.

It really wasn't until 1873

when a 12-year-old boy named Vaughn

found one of the one-cent Magentas.

Now, he didn't realize that it was unique.

He asked a local collector if he could

sell the local collector some of his stamps.

The local collector said "Sure," gave him a few shillings

and then he in turn sold his collection

to a dealer in Scotland.

And then he in turn sold it to

the world's greatest collector of stamps, Count Ferrary.

At the beginning of the First World War as an Austrian,

he fled France as an enemy alien, went to Switzerland.

The stamp stayed behind in Paris,

and then he died in 1917.

And in his is will,

he left his collection to the Berlin Postal Museum.

The Germans, of course, lost the war,

and the French seized Ferrary's stamp collection

as enemy property belonging to Germany

and sold it in a celebrated series of sales.

And in 1922, the British Guiana came up for sale

and set a new world record for a stamp,

which it consistently did every time it was sold at auction.

At that sale, famously, you know, King George V

is supposed to have bid and not gotten the stamp.

And it went to a man named Arthur Hind,

who was an industrialist,

and certainly owning the British Guiana

made his collection famous, he realized that.

He was very proud of that

and created his own a postcard of the stamp in fact.

And then when he died, there was a great court case

because he was estranged from his, uh, his widow,

and she'd been left the contents of his house.

And it turned out that the stamp actually was still in the house.

Put it on the market and ultimately sold it

to a man named Frederick Small

who made a lot of money in the rayon business.

And in 1970, it was bought by a syndicate of buyers

led by Irwin Weinberg,

famously traveling around the world with a briefcase

strapped to people's wrists by handcuffs.

Oh, the showmanship!

Then after that came a lot of television appearances.

The Mike Douglas Show.

To Tell the Truth. Yeah. Yeah.

And, uh, they didn't guess me, by the way.

[laughing]

The Japanese came to me and offered me a marvelous deal

if I would bring it to Tokyo and exhibit it.

And I said, "Well, I just don't know,

I have to talk to my partners and see how they feel about it."

They said, "But we promise you one thing.

"It will be shown in Tokyo exactly the way

we showed when we borrowed the Mona Lisa."

Well, that was good enough for me.

We showed it in London, Paris,

Tokyo, Prague,

Toronto, New York, and Perth, Australia.

It would always bring out

tens of thousands of people to see it.

Ten years is a long time for any investment.

The partners were getting a little tired.

I was getting a little tired.

And then we decided we'll sell.

And the venue was going to be the same place

that we bought it through ten years earlier.

And I gave a great cocktail party that night, by the way,

in our suite at the hotel.

The New Yorker was there. Reuters was there.

Oh, it was a big, big thing.

Well, what happens is

we had $280,000 in this thing.

The stamp opens a $100,000.

He goes a 100, 125, half, 200, quarter, half,

300, quarter, half, 400, quarter, half, 500.

I then turn to one of my children and say,

"Go to the telephone, call the liquor store

and tell them to double the order."

And if it wasn't, it should've been Dom Perignon.

[man] 750, 800,000.

$850,000.

It's knocked down, sold!

[reporter] The bidding on the stamp was over so quickly,

many didn't know who purchased it.

The British Guiana sold for $850,000 plus 10% commission.

And no one knows what the new owner will do

with the world's most precious stamp.

The new owner has chosen to remain anonymous.

They had nobody else to talk to but me.

And I found myself on the front page

of the New York Times the next morning.

I never dreamed of doing that twice with the same thing.

Sometime later, I got a phone call from John Du Pont.

He said, "I am the buyer of the stamp,

"and I'd like to pick it up.

"Meet me in New York

and then we'll see where we go from there."

I said, "Great." So I meet him in New York.

Du Pont says, "Listen," he said, "I'm going to go home,

and if you would like to come along, I'd love to have you."

Sure. We went over on the East Side to the heliport.

He said to the pilot, "I want Mr. Weinberg

to see the Statue of Liberty on our way out."

It goes up, right up by the torch and circles it.

He said, "I just want you to know that I feel very strongly

"that there are very few people in this world

"who are qualified personally to own a treasurer such as this,

and I believe you are the other one."

[music plays]

I've kept the memory of this inanimate object alive

by keeping every scrap of paper that pertains to it.

There's a history, there are other people who've seen it,

who have owned it.

There are records.

I can produce the cancelled check

from the British Guiana,

It's indisputable.

Du Pont owned it, exhibited it a couple of times,

but it's really not been seen

since the 19... the late 1980s.

And then he, in turn, died in 2010.

And his estate now has put it up for sale with us.

The most famous stamp in the world.

I don't know what it will fetch,

but let's assume for the sake of argument,

brings a price never before heard of by man or beast.

$5,000,000.

Well, you can't buy a third rate old master for $5,000,000!

Yeah, I think it's ugly.

That's not to say anybody else does.

I mean, I know that a lot of people

who think it's absolutely magnificent.

Uh, I know a lot of people who think

that what I'm collecting is ugly or boring.

That's the beauty of stamp collecting,

there's no right and there's no wrong.

A hundred Rothkos out there

and 10,000 Picassos,

but there's only one Penny Magenta,

and someone is going to really get off on that.

It won't be me, alas.

Stamps, I think, are very, very, very inexpensive.

They have a lot further to go value-wise than many other items.

Somebody pays $28,000,000 for some obnoxious painting.

There isn't a $28,000,000 stamp.

The great pieces of philately, in my opinion, are dirt cheap.

Dirt cheap. They always have been.

[indistinct chatting]

[gavel pounds]

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

My Name is David Redden,

and I want to welcome you to Sotheby's

and our sale this evening of the British Guiana.

And I will start the bidding at $4,500,000.

It's at $4,500,000 now.

At $5,000,000 now, bidding at $5,000,000.

At $5,500,000.

At $5,500,000.

At $6,000,000 now, $6,000,000.

$6,500,000.

At $6,500,000.

At $7,500,000.

At $7,500,000. Any advance?

At $7,700,000.

At $7,700,000.

$7,800,000.

$7,900,000.

On the telephone, at $7,900,000.

Fair warning, at $7,900,000.

On the telephone, then, $7,900,000.

[pounds gavel] $7,900,000.

[applause]

You have to accept this idea.

The British Guiana is "the" unique.

Unique means there is no other.

Nothing has a history like the British Guiana.

It's sheer ugliness makes it beautiful, really.

Yeah.

[Redden] This sets a brand-new world record for a stamp,

and the fact that this rather wonderful

but very small object

brought nearly $9.5 million

shows that the market is strong, it's really strong.

[music plays]

I'm Stuart Weitzman,

and women say I'm more famous for my shoes,

but for the past few days,

a lot of the stamp collectors in the world know me

because I've bought the British Guiana stamp.

When I was ten years old, my brother collected stamps,

and I inherited his collection when he went off to university.

There isn't a place in the international album

to put the British Guiana.

No one who has this album ever expects

that it's anything more than symbolic,

to show us that there are great rarities.

I was reading about the British Guiana stamp

in a New York Times article on its up-and-coming sale

several months down the road.

It had been publicized for a long time.

The man who owned it, we all know the story,

he had killed his wrestler,

spent the rest of his life in jail,

and until he passed away,

the stamp was not available for sale.

And I, I can see that page with that hole where that stamp goes.

And I said, "Okay, I'm going to make a phone call."

I've often had a frustration with items

that I think the world should see

and have a chance to appreciate that owners don't let out.

And I often try to convince the owner

to display them or sell them.

There are a lot of people who would have a great interest

in seeing items such as this stamp and documents

that are rare and other things of that nature.

Not everyone cares.

Um, but enough people do that they should have that chance.

That's the beauty, of course, of museums.

Anybody can see anything in a museum.

They're not warehouses.

They're not storing things, there for showing things.

I decided that this would be a good way

to fulfill one of my ambitions,

and, uh, alleviate one of my frustrations

about the fact that: here's the stamp.

160-170 years old.

Very few people have ever had a chance to see it.

The few owners who have had it

have kept it under lock and key.

You know, the excitement of obtaining something

at a highly publicized auction, the adrenaline that flows.

Any bidder will tell you.

I don't know how you duplicate that,

and the pleasure I am getting out of it

for its availability to the public,

I expected but never as much as it's been so far.

It's at the Smithsonian Postal Museum in Washington

and temporarily on display at events around the world.

The British Guiana stamp certainly has its fame,

not because of its beauty and design.

When I hear someone say, "It's a gorgeous magenta color,"

I think, I make leather

that's better-looking magenta than that, you know?

It isn't about being a gorgeous stamp.

That's not what it's about.

The stamp is about being rare

and having stories behind it and how it was found.

I met people whose business was stamps

and others whose hobby was stamps.

They both had a great passion for it.

I got the impression that those for whom it was a business,

it was also a hobby.

All collectors have the same passion.

You know, you almost never think you can get everything you want,

and you really, generally don't.

So the challenge is there, continually.

The story behind what you find is exciting.

So many collectors have told me how they found this piece

that they're showing or that piece that they're showing.

They're the Sherlock Holmes of their trade.

It's, uh, it's brought a little extra fun in my life.

Truthfully, it has.

If I were in a position where someone wanted to buy it from me

and it would've resulted in, say, in a wonderful profit

that I would not have expected,

I would have to think,

what would I do with the money?

I don't show these stamps to encourage others to go buy things.

I want people to see it.

It's simple. It's not more complicated than that.

That's exactly how simple it is.

Here's something that I love to see.

I have a chance, here's your chance

Why stamps?

To those who know, there's no answer necessary.

To those who don't, there's no answer possible.

And that really is what it comes down to.

A lot about collecting, you know,

a lot about many of the interests that I have

and I think a lot of people have.

I'm not sure there's a logical reason.

How many walks of life are there where you can find something,

you can discover something about the world

that nobody else knows,

nobody else has discovered, yet?

It's a unique opportunity, and, and...

you can find it in all sorts of areas of philately.

It's not just one place.

You can become the expert in your field of philately.

You can write a book that's never been published.

You can share it with your colleagues

and be esteemed as an expert in your field.

It's that opportunity of discovery.

It's hard put it into words,

but I think stamps can be beautiful.

It's a progression of history,

the culture and artistic tastes,

and the topics change over time.

So it's really like a time capsule

as you look at, uh, the stamps

that had been issued over a hundred years.

It's generally a curious mind

that wants to collect and wants to learn.

Every collector is really a curator

of his own little museum.

You know, I don't know

what the future of our hobbies is,

but I can imagine, in a really space--

outer-space-kind-of-driven future.

Someone's going to put a whole bunch of stamps on a computer chip

and embed it in the back of my brain,

and then I can just flip through the catalog of life

and see every stamp ever coming out

and just lie there in the chair, thinking and say,

"Okay, organize every stamp

that's got a cat that's black and white."

And suddenly, instantly,

there I'm going to look at all these cats

as I'm petting the one on my lap.

You know, I just think we can't even imagine the options

and possibilities that this hobby can provide for us.

It's passion.

You can't fake passion.

It doesn't matter whether you're black, you're white,

you're man, you're a woman, you're gay, you're straight,

you're a Democrat, you're a Republican,

we're there because we all have our own odd passion in stamps.

I just, I just wish sometimes that, you know,

you can communicate to other people,

either you get it or you don't.

And just-- when you get it, and the light bulb goes off...

I mean, shit, it's fun!

[Ian] Sorry.

I look at most things as passing things, I guess.

I tend to view the world as...

7 billion people

you know, created 15 billion years ago,

and there'll be another 15 billion on top of that.

And so, you know, so a stamp collection,

how meaningful is that within the context of humanity

and the history that we've had and will have,

uh, you know, when I'm no longer here?

Um, you know, it was fun to do.

Is it the achievement of my life? No.

Um, I would hope that would be my family,

and, uh, second of all, my career.

And this was a hobby, and, yeah, it was great,

and I am glad I did it and sort of proud.

It's like, um, it's a fun thing.

[chuckles]

I probably haven't looked at my collection in 20 years,

which is amazing because I could tell you all about it.

I could tell you the various stamps,

and you know, the Lindbergh stamp,

which was a big deal because living Americans weren't on stamps,

but they got around it by just having the plane as opposed to him,

which is better because the plane is more noteworthy anyway.

It's so odd. It's like your hometown.

I know they're there, I'm glad they're there.

Every once in a while, my kids look at them and they say,

"Why don't you-- you know, you could sell these."

I'm like, "Well, but I can't conceive of selling them

because they're part of who I am."

In a chaotic and often frightening world,

stamp collecting is a way to create

a beautiful order and symmetry

that might be hard for some people to find anywhere else.

I will not retire willingly from this business.

They will find me slumped over my desk

with a pair of gold stamp tongs,

deader than a doornail.

But I will not voluntarily quit because it's been too much fun.

I love my clients. I love my work.

It's fascinating, intriguing,

mind-expanding,

and something which allows us

to always be an academic student of the subject.

Because there is a phantasmagoria of things to know

about an incalculable number of different items.

So it's something that one can devote their life to,

trying to gain a modest understanding of,

and for me, that is the great fascination of philately

and is why I love it dearly now as I did 50 years ago.

All kids have a dream.

I talked to myself,

someday I'm going to get outta this town.

That's what I had in the back of my mind.

That I was going to go to New York

and do a Horatio Alger bit,

and in due course

be known to every head waiter

and every night club in New York City

and take-- own New York City in that way.

That's all I wanted to do.

And all of a sudden, I'm doing it.

And by the way, on the back of that stamp

are several initials of the former owners.

I added mine.

So if I ever see it again,

I'll know if it's the real thing.

[chuckles]

[music plays]

[music plays]