SUPER STAMP SUNDAY: JAMES DEAN

SUPER STAMP SUNDAY: HOW TO BECOME A MILLIONAIRE...

Block of inverted "Jenny" stamps...

Misprinted in 1918, the stamps bear the image of an upside-down plane in flight. The stamps have ranked among the most valuable for years. Many editions of the Guinness Book of World Records listed the images as the most valuable stamps of all-time.

The plane is a Curtiss JN-4 (“Jenny”). This was a World War 1 trainer plane that moved to Airmail service after the War. It is known that 700 of the mistakes were printed, but inspectors only caught approximately 600 of the mistakes. The block of stamps that was sold is possibly the rarest of them all. The printing plate's number is visible in the left corner. No other stamp in the series contains that feature.

The stamp was auctioned by the Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, INC. The total price of sale, after buyer's premium, was $2,970,000.00. The last Jenny stamp sold at auction, also sold at Siegel Auctions, brought $525,000.00 in June, 2005.

http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/Home/4/1/73/1014?articleID=50832

P.S. I know most (if not all) the original Jenny stamps are already owned by collectors and such. But I used to collect stamps, and I'm eccentric as hell. So who's to say that another stamp collector (now deceased) didn't keep his most interesting and valuable stamps hidden away in some battered old metal box or trunk? And his unsuspecting family stashed all his "worthless" belongings away in the attic, after they inherited his property?  You never can tell. Truth really is often stranger than fiction :-)

Update:  Mystic Stamp Company sells Inverted Jenny plate block; purchase price ‘north of $4.8 million’  YIKES!!

SUPER STAMP SUNDAY: SYLVIA PLATH

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LAST CALL

What good is a phone?
In cold England or the States?
Just ask Sylvia.

Haiku © 2009 by Dylan Mitchell

SUPER STAMP SUNDAY: EMILY DICKINSON

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UNWANTED

I found an old book in the
gutter today: A battered blue
hardcover unwanted by the
world. It had been kicked
about by a brutal foot - more
than a few pages were wrinkled
and torn. So I plucked it up
and carried it home. After I
wiped off some of the dirt
I saw a cover as blue as
the sea. I wiped some more
until a familiar face appeared -
the Belle Of Amherst - my breath
stood still - Emily Dickinson in
the gutter? Imagine that! Her
good poems once fed my hungry
heart, when the busy world
wouldn't throw me a bone. Now
I'd plucked her from the gutter,
and given her a better home -
so who really saved who?

Poem © 2009 by Dylan Mitchell

SUPER STAMP SUNDAY: JANIS JOPLIN

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Okay, here we go: The first official SUPER STAMP SUNDAY post! Did you guess (thanks to my previous post) that Janis Joplin would finally go postal in late 2014? I'm gonna buy the really cool FDC (First Day Cover) for sure.

I'm thinking it might be sort of awesome to include a little haiku moment with the postal one. So here's something I wrote about Janis a year or two ago? It's not perfect (syllable count totally sucks), but it pretty much sums up how I feel about this great singer:

LITTLE GIRL BLUE

So large on the stage
Her voice like thunder and rain
Little girl blue so alone

P.S. I'm still adjusting to the time change, so I'm sleepy/lazy as hell. I need more coffee big time. See you next week - when I'm actually wide awake!

SUPER STAMP SUNDAY (HALLOWEEN)

I know it's not Sunday, but I couldn't resist posting this really cool US postage stamp from the Classic Hollywood Monsters series (first issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 1997) just in time for Halloween.

There were five monsters to choose from: Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera, and Frankenstein's Monster.

Anybody still remember the days when the cost of a postage stamp was just 32 cents, and snail mail had not yet become a thing of the past? Oh well at least most folks still send out their Christmas cards the old fashioned way. Plus the utility bills never stop coming.

I'd best hurry up and grab a pumpkin at the grocery store before it's too late. There were only a few sad and neglected looking ones left at Safeway (last time I checked). But rumor has it that there's still plenty of fresh pumpkins on sale at Fred Meyer, so I'm gonna go for it. Hope you have a Spooktacular Halloween!

P.S. I'm officially launching my Super Stamp Sunday posts on November 2nd, so if you are a lover of U.S. postage stamps (or just curious as hell) be on the lookout. Can you figure out (no help from Google) which awesome rock star from the late 1960s is finally going postal? Here's a little haiku hint for you:

PIECE OF HER HEART

Afraid and lonely
A wallflower from Texas
Bloomed into a rose

Haiku © 2014 by Dylan Mitchell