5. 1869 Pictorials—Inverted Center Errors
Stamp collectors love rarities, firsts and errors—and these stamps have all three, plus some politics. While the stamps were printed under President Ulysses S. Grant, their issue was conceived in 1868, during the fraught days after Andrew Johnson had been impeached, but still held on to power. Highly controversial and discontinued after one year, these were the first U.S. stamps printed using two colors. They also denoted scenes, like Columbus’s arrival in America (previously stamps had only featured portraits). The pictorials are also the first example of a printing error by the Post Office Department. To print in more than one color, each color had to be printed separately; the careless placing of several sheets upside down in the press resulted in the first American invert errors.
When a four-stamp block of the 1869 Pictorials (24-cent inverts featuring John Turnbull’s painting, Declaration of Independence) was sold at auction in London in 1938, it attracted worldwide attention. It was the first time a transatlantic telephone line was used to purchase a lot at an auction.
