Sotheby's New York sells the most famous stamp for $9.5 million
June 25, 2014: For the fourth time in its illustrious history, the British Guiana One- Cent Black on Magenta set a new world auction record for any stamp at Sotheby’s New York, achieving $9,480,000 – nearly 1 billion times its original face value.
No stamp is rarer than the British Guiana, a unique yet unassuming penny issue from 1856, which has been heralded as the pinnacle of stamp collecting for more than a century.
The stamp was rediscovered by a 12-year-old Scottish boy living in South America in 1873, and from there passed through some of the most important stamp collections ever assembled. The British Guiana had been out of public view since the 1986.
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