I’m a day or two behind on this, but: Inverted Jenny #49 is now accounted for.
As far as anyone was able to determine, the stamp went from William T. Robey (the guy who discovered the error and bought the sheet of 100 stamps) to Eugene Klein (who bought the sheet from Robey for $15,000) to Col. E.H.R. “Ned” Green (who bought the sheet from Klein for $20,000 and split it up). After Green, nobody knew where #49 was until recently.
Mr. Lyons said the Illinois man’s 91-year-old father had been a stamp collector, but the stamp had come from his mother’s side of the family. A great-uncle apparently bought it after the sheet of 100 was broken up, and after the great-uncle died, the great-aunt left it to the man’s mother in the 1930s.
“It spent all those years in bank vaults, which was a good thing for the stamp,” he said. Mr. Lyons said the man, who has asked not to be identified, could not explain why his father never put it in an album with his other stamps.
This is way cool. Because the stamp was never mounted and spent most of the time in safety deposit boxes, it is in very good shape. According to the article in Linn’s Stamp News, the stamp has been graded at 90 XF.
If it goes up for auction…an XF-SUP 95 graded Inverted Jenny went for $1.35 million in 2016. I can easily see this one going for over a million.
The only Inverted Jenny unaccounted for at the moment is #66: that one was part of a block of four that was stolen in 1955. The other three stamps eventually resurfaced.
Inverted Jenny website maintained by Siegal Auctions. This includes a very useful interactive reconstruction of the entire sheet.