`Seaway invert' is expected to fetch at
least $60,000 at Sotheby's in London
BY RANDY BOSWELL
The most
embarrassing stamp snafu in Canadian history is set to go under the spotlight
at a landmark auction in Britain ,
where an extremely rare, unused quartet of the famous "Seaway invert"
— a five-cent issue featuring an upside-down image celebrating U.S.-Canada
friendship — is expected to fetch more than $60,000.
That's a whopping
300,000 times the stamp's original face value. Hailed by collectors as one of
the world's classic postal errors, and described by the auction house
Sotheby's as "an icon of Canadian philately," the botched printing
of the stamp — intended to commemorate the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway
in 1959 — caused a sensation at the time.
It even prompted Time
magazine to profile a 20-year-old Winnipeg
stenographer, Mildred Mason, whose discovery of the mistake "touched off
a treasure hunt" in Canada
as collectors raced to snap up the misprints, while the federal government
scrambled to destroy the inverted lot.
Red lettering
First noticed in
August 1959 after the stamp went on sale by the millions across Canada , the erroneous batch of a few thousand
featured red lettering on either side of an inverted central image — an
American bald eagle and Canadian maple leaf entwined in rings and superimposed
on a map of the shared Great Lakes . The
blunder was particularly mortifying for Canadian officials because the Seaway
inverts overshadowed a special bi-national collaboration in which the U.S.
Postal Service printed its own version of the stamp — the first-ever joint
Canada-U.S. issue.
About 250 misprinted
specimens escaped the federal shredder. Dozens of those were acquired by the
quick-thinking Winnipeg
stamp dealer Kasimir Bileski, who paid Mason more than $5,000 for her one-buck
block of 20 and earned an appearance on TV's Front Page Challenge for his
relentless bid to corner the market in Seaway misprints. Most of the stamps
have ended up in public collections around the world, including the
Smithsonian's U.S. National Postal Museum, but about 60 are still believed to
be in private hands.
The block of four
being sold by Sotheby's in May belonged to the late Sir Gawaine Baillie, an
eccentric British aristocrat and 1960s motorsports celebrity who amassed one of
the world's most valuable stamp collections before his death in 2003.
Another unused pair
of the Seaway inverts, originally purchased in Ottawa ,
is also being offered at the London
sale. That couplet is expected to go for about $25,000. Baillie's collection is
being liquidated in a record-smashing series of 10 sales that began in 2004,
including one New York auction last year that
saw a single, ultra-rare example of Canada 's most famous stamp — the
"Twelve-Penny Black" of 1851— bought for nearly $250,000, double the
predicted price.
Pushing final price
The significance
attached to the Sea-way stamps by collectors could similarly push their final
price well beyond the pre-sale estimate.
The 1959 invert has
been described by Charles Verge, president of the Royal Philatelic Society of
Canada, as "the most spectacular stamp error in Canadian philately."
The mistake occurred
because in Canada
the two colours were printed separately and the stamp's blue plate was
initially placed upside-down.
--CanWest News Service
