Errata

Back in November, a real estate developer in New York purchased a single twenty-four-cent stamp for $2 million (U.S.). Issued by the United States Post Office in May 1918, the design places a red frame around a blue Curtiss JN-4, a First World War training aircraft that the postal service had just started using to deliver mail. To be printed with two colours, sheets of the stamp had to go onto a flatbed press twice. On one of those sheets — each with 100 individual stamps — the biplane was accidentally turned upside down.

While it’s certainly the most coveted stamp in American philately, the Inverted Jenny was not the first printing mistake in the postal service’s history. Several images were inverted in a pictorial series from 1869, for instance. Then in May 1901, ahead of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, a few ships, trains, and electric cars entered circulation miraculously defying gravity. Australia, Belgium, India, Jamaica...