The British Guiana then entered the UK in 1878, and shortly after, it was purchased in Paris by Count Philippe la Renotière von Ferrary, perhaps the greatest stamp collector in history. Following the war, France seized his collection, which had been donated to the Postmuseum in Berlin, as part of war reparations due from Germany, and sold the stamp in 1922 as one of a series of celebrated auctions from 1921–25. It was bought by Arthur Hind, a textile magnate from New York, for its first auction-record price of $35,000, followed by: Australian engineer Frederick T. Small; then a consortium headed by Irwin Weinberg; then by John du Pont, heir to the eponymous chemical company fortune, eccentric amateur sportsman, and avid collector. Du Pont paid $935,000 for the stamp in a 1980 auction, before it was last sold at auction to Weitzman, marking the object’s most recent record-setting price of $9.48 million. Carrying on the tradition of previous owners of the British Guiana, Weitzman added his own personal mark to the reverse of the stamp this past October, inscribing his initials “SW” along with a line drawing of a stiletto shoe as a nod to his legacy in fashion.

THE 24-CENT INVERTED JENNY PLATE BLOCK
The first United States airmail issue and the most highly recognized and sought-after philatelic error, the 1918 24-Cent Inverted Jenny Plate Block (estimate $5/7 million) is the most famous and valuable item in United States stamp collecting. There was only one sheet of 100 Inverted Jennies ever sold, and only one plate block comprising positions 87-88 and 97-98. It last appeared on the market 16 years ago when it sold at auction for $2.97 million and was subsequently purchased privately by Weitzman in 2014.

To pay the designated 24 cent rate for the new official airmail route, the United States Postal Service released a special bi-colored stamp in May 1918 featuring a blue Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplane – the country’s first airmail carrier – surrounded by a carmine red frame. A single sheet of 100 stamps with the biplanes appearing upside-down – due to a printing error – was sold for $24, the face value of the 100 stamps, to William T. Robey. A cashier at a stock brokerage firm and an astute stamp collector, Robey recognized the rarity of the flawed sheet and rebuffed the USPS demands that he return the stamps after they learned of their mistake. Instead he sold the sheet just a few days later marking the beginning of the wild and sinuous journey of the 100 Inverted Jennies, which encompasses some of the greatest stories in American stamp history.

Having rapidly gained notoriety within the philatelic community, Eugene Klein – the Philadelphia stamp dealer who purchased the sheet from Robey – immediately sold it to the multi-millionaire Colonel “Ned” Green, a wildly eccentric stamp and coin collector. Klein later persuaded Green to allow him to sell individual stamps to eager collectors, requiring him to carefully break the sheet into singles and blocks which he did after discreetly, and astutely, numbering every stamp in light pencil on the reverse. The Colonel retained numerous singles and all the major blocks – including the present plate number block, which then comprised eight examples. Following Green’s death in 1944, the block of eight Jennies passed into the collection of Amos Eno where it was separated into a block of four and ten years later it was purchased by the Weill Brothers of New Orleans, beginning an association that was to last for thirty-five years. Described as “The most important item in United States philately” when the Weill Brothers stock came to auction in 1989, it was bought for the unprecedented sum of $1.1 million by an anonymous buyer who kept the block until 2005 when famed bond investor William Gross purchased it for $2.97 million.