Rare 1918 ‘Inverted Jenny’ US stamp sells for record-setting $2m

Talk about a stamp of approval.

A New York man bought a rare postage stamp at an auction on Wednesday for the record-setting price of $2m.

Charles Hack, 76, now owns the unusual piece of US history that dates back to 1918 and is known as a “Jenny”, featuring a blue inverted airplane on a red and white background.

It’s the “the holy grail of postage”, Hack told the Washington Post.

The Inverted Jenny dominates postage stamp culture, or “philately” lore. The stamp’s upside down Curtiss JN-4 airplane was printed in error so its production was stopped, making the stamp incredibly valuable.

“Only one sheet of 100 inverted center stamps was sold,” the Smithsonian’s national postal museum says. The museum adds: “The error occurred either when an inverted carmine frame sheet was fed into the small hand press for the second impression or when the plate printer, after inking and wiping, placed an inverted blue vignette plate into the press.”

Hack has collected stamps since he was a child, and he also owns other Inverted Jennys. In the early 2000s, he bought a Jenny for about $300,000 (£244,329).

The popular and long-running animated television show The Simpsons featured the Jenny stamp in an episode in which the fictional family’s patriarch Homer Simpson finds a sheet of Jenny stamps at a garage sale. Unaware of its value, he says “the airplane’s upside down,” calls it “junk” and tosses it into a pile of trash that includes other lucrative items such as the declaration of independence and a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius violin.

In honor of the stamp’s place in US mail history, the national postal museum printed replicas of the Inverted Jenny in 2013. Four original Jennys are displayed in the national postal museum’s William H Gross Stamp Gallery, the world’s largest stamp gallery.