The sticky, squint-eyed world of the stamp collector was rocked to its very perforations last week. It was a flurry over a flaw, and as every one of the U.S.'s more than 13 million stamp collectors knows, a flaw is worth far more than perfection. Rarity is, of course, the touchstone by which all stamps are valued; but more often than not, a rare stamp is different from millions of its counterparts only because it has some technical disfigurement. To the tweezer-and-magnifying-glass set, discovery of such minor imperfections as missing watermarks or too-much-violet-in-the-carmine is like finding a Rembrandt painted under a Rousseau or a mint-condition 1908 Locomobile in a hay barn.
Sugarplums, College. It began last month when the Bureau of Engraving and Printing turned out 120 million oblong black, brown and yellow stamps to memorialize the late U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. Jewelry Salesman Leonard Sherman, 38, of Irvington, N.J., bought four 50-stamp sheets of the first-day Hammarskjolds, next day took them out of his drawer for a closer look. What he saw made his hands tremble: the yellow background was printed not only off-center but upside down, so that an inverted "4¢" mark appeared in ghostly white 50 times on the sheet in the wrong place. Sherman, who has been collecting stamps for only four years, knew the story of the 1918 airmail stamp, when a sheet of a hundred 24¢ stamps was printed with a quaint old Army Jenny putting along upside down like something out of a flying circus. Individual stamps from that sheet are now worth $13,000; a center line block of four goes for $65,000. Visions of philatelic sugarplums began to dance through Sherman's head.
Until he could find out more about their value, Sherman decided to keep quiet about his stamps. Then, last week, he saw a small newspaper item about Gerald Clark, a collector in Ohio who had bought a sheet of the faulty Hammarskjolds, had mailed 31 of them off on letters before a friend pointed out the oddity. Clark checked with local post offices for other flawed stamps, found none, and optimistically figured that his remaining 19 stamps were worth $200,000. On that basis, Sherman figured that his intact sheet of 50 must be valued at more than $500,000, started making plans for sending his five sons through college.
Jackpot, Scandal. Vanity overcoming discretion, Sherman phoned the Newark Evening News to boast of his own treasure trove, and the story of his bonanza burst into headlines across the country. In Washington, Postmaster General J. Edward Day reacted hastily. He directed the printing of 400,000 more Hammarskjolds with the identical imperfect backgrounds —thus knocking down the worth of the originals to little more than the 4¢ they had cost at the post office. Moaned Sherman's wife: "Isn't that lousy?"
Sherman did what he could. He asked the federal courts to issue a restraining order to block the sale. But it came too late. Some 320,000 of the phony collectors' items had been snapped up in under four hours at the department's Philatelic Sales Agency before the order arrived.