Every now and then, the post office accidentally gives collectors a small miracle. In the case of the $1 Rush Lamp and Candle Holder stamp, that miracle came in the form of a tiny upside-down printing that ended up embarrassing the CIA and delighting philatelists worldwide.
America's Light, Printed Crooked
But this stamp had one more story to tell, not about the Enlightenment, but about human error.
How Do You Turn a Candle Upside Down?
The stamp was produced the hard way: multiple colors, multiple passes, multiple presses at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The flame was printed lithographically, while the detailed brown elements, the holder, the lettering, all the engraved lines, were added later in a separate pass.
At some point between November 1 and 15, 1985, at least one sheet of 400 stamps went wrong. When the already-printed sheets went back to get the brown engraving, one pane of 100 somehow went through the press flipped. The result: the brown portion: holder, candle outline, and inscription, is perfectly upside down relative to the flame.
To non-collectors it might look like just a quirky little design. To us, it's a classic invert error, the kind of thing that makes your heart beat a little faster when you notice it in a pile of ordinary stamps.
Enter the CIA
The story would have been good enough if the sheet had simply gone to a random customer at a random post office. But this is the "CIA invert" for a reason.
In April 1986, an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency was sent to the McLean, Virginia, post office substation to buy stamps with government funds. He came back with a partial sheet of $1 Rush Lamp stamps. For a while, no one noticed anything odd. Only later did one sharp-eyed colleague realize that the brown parts were upside down compared to the flame.
Imagine that moment: a group of intelligence professionals, trained to spot details in satellite photos and classified documents, suddenly discovering that their own postage was more "intelligent" than they had given it credit for.
Nine CIA employees then pooled their money, quietly swapped normal $1 stamps in place of the inverts, and kept some of the error stamps for themselves. The rest were sold to a dealer, and at that point, the story stopped being an internal office curiosity and became philatelic legend.
When the Government Wants Its Stamps Back
Once word got out, the U.S. government was not amused. These stamps had been purchased with public funds, and officials argued that the employees should not profit from what was essentially government property.
Investigations followed, and there were attempts to reclaim the stamps. In the end, four employees reportedly lost their jobs for failing to cooperate, and four of the stamps were returned in exchange for saving those positions. Those four stamps are now preserved at the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C.
From Office Stationery to Rarity
Only about 95 copies of the CIA invert are accounted for today, making it the rarest and most famous error in the entire Americana series.
Ironically, the Americana definitive series itself was never very popular with the general public and ended up being one of the shortest-lived definitive series of the twentieth century. Yet this one mistake, a single inverted brown printing on a $1 rush lamp stamp, gave the series an enduring fame among collectors that no advertising campaign could ever have achieved.
Next time you flip through a stock book and come across a rather dull brown Americana definitive, take a second look at that rush lamp. Somewhere out there, a handful are still burning, upside down.
Read more: Smithsonian
No comments:
Post a Comment