That Jenny is getting around. In Jenkintown today, one of the most sought-after U.S. postage stamps -- a rare "Inverted Jenny" 24-cent airmail stamp of 1918 -- sold at auction for $230,000. Montgomery County stamp broker John Apfelbaum, who arranged the auction, said the winning bidder was a stamp dealer from Lancaster County, who bought it for a client in the Midwest.
Just last month, a near-perfect condition Inverted Jenny -- so named for its misprinted drawing of the Curtiss JN-4 airplane -- went for $977,500 in New York. And today in Cherry Hill, another Inverted Jenny will be given away by Amy Polumbo, the stand-up-to-blackmail Miss New Jersey, in a drawing sponsored by StampWants.com, which by the way claims its value is around $400,000.
All proof that the collectible stamp business has lately gotten hot. Apfelbaum says, as a rule of thumb, that stamp values have gone up during periods when the broader economy was going south. Or, in Apfelbaum's words, "when there's been a lack of confidence in the government, combined with a cheap dollar internationally."
Apfelbaum, president of Earl P.L. Apfelbaum Inc., said the market's still not as hot as the late 1970s, when "prices went up 400, 500 percent in five years. That's not bad - I should have gotten out then."
Apfelbaum's Inverted Jenny stamp, which was part of a collection that had been amassed by a retired real estate developer from Maryland, had several flaws, including a prominent crease and the absence of some of its original adhesive. He actually had predicted it would fetch between $200,000 and $300,000. "We had a lot of bidders up to about $140,000. And then were two people for up to the $230,000 it sold for," he said.
A little history: The Inverted Jenny was issued to coincide with the first U.S. air mail flights between Washington, Philadelphia and New York. It has long been a high-demand stamp for collectors. Fewer than 100 are in circulation, and with investors flocking to stamps for high-yield returns on equity, it is has become all the more costly in recent months and years.
Apfelbaum equates the valuable postage stamp to a "Bergdorf Goodman" item, and having one to sell is the stamp-collecting equivalent of extracting a needle from a haystack, so to speak.
So it was no surprise that the auction felt a bit like a holiday gala at Apfelbaum, a family-run business that has been around since 1930. The auction house sells $1 million in stamps each month -- hundreds of thousands of them, in fact, which must be sorted by hand, valued and set aside into lots.
Only three people do the sorting. And their tools are a pair of elongated tweezers known as "stamp tongs," a magnifying glass and, most important of all, trained eye and encyclopedic knowledge of all things stamps. Apfelbaum says he's "been trained since I was a child." He is among a trio who sort and value the many boxes of stamps that pass through the firm each month. His expertise is so extensive that he used to be vice president of the American Philatelic Society in Bellefonte, Pa.
All four Apfelbaum siblings are among the auction house's 13 employees: John, 54, Ken, 52, Missy, 51, and Susanne, 43. Natives of Cheltenham Township, their family roots extend back through the generations right across the city line into Philadelphia's Olney and Logan sections.
The stamp trade never looked hotter than it did during the Carter administration in the late 1970s. Inflation was high, the economy was in the tank and investors rushed to buy rare stamps as though they would become the next wave of great collectible art, Apfelbaum said. Then, just like a hot real estate market, things cooled -- and stayed cool for a while. Generally speaking, stamp prices started to fall annually in the mid-1980s and didn't rebound until the late-1990s.
"We had 10 pretty lean years," Apfelbaum recalls.
Not anymore.
