Famous Inverted Jenny “Locket Copy” Sells for $439,200 at Stack’s Bowers

One of the most distinctive examples of the famous 1918 Inverted Jenny has sold for $439,200 at Stack’s Bowers Galleries. The 24-cent United States Air Post stamp, known as Position 9 from the original sheet of 100 Inverted Jennys, is still housed inside the gold-rimmed glass locket that has been part of its story for nearly a century. The stamp was offered as part of the Collection of William Alonzo Rinehart IV.

Position 9 is a never-hinged example with a straight edge at the top, a short corner perforation at the upper left and trivial corner creases at the lower left and right. The locket itself has a clasp and a small chip at the bottom of one side. The piece is accompanied by a never-hinged example of the normal 24-cent stamp. When Stack’s Bowers previously offered the locket in May 2015, the normal stamp and the Inverted Jenny were positioned back-to-back inside it.

The story of Position 9 stretches all the way back to the discovery of the Inverted Jenny sheet in 1918. Collector William T. Robey purchased a sheet of 100 of the new 24-cent Air Post stamps at a Washington, D.C., post office on May 14, 1918. The blue Curtiss “Jenny” airplanes on every stamp had been printed upside down within their carmine-red frames. Robey paid $24 for the sheet and quickly realized what he had found. Within a week, he sold it for $15,000 to Philadelphia stamp dealer Eugene Klein.

Before the sheet was separated, Klein numbered each stamp in pencil on the back from 1 through 100. Those numbers have allowed individual Inverted Jennys to be identified by their original positions ever since. Position 9 eventually became part of the collection of “Colonel” Edward H. R. Green. He placed the stamp inside the glass-sided locket along with a normal Jenny stamp and gave it to his wife, Mabel. After Green died in 1936, the locket largely disappeared from view.

It resurfaced in 1950 when philatelic journalist George Sloane examined an item found in a safe-deposit box belonging to Mabel Green’s estate. Inside was the locket containing both the Inverted Jenny and its normal counterpart. The locket later passed to Dorothy Nicholson, Mabel Green’s longtime companion, and remained in a New York safe-deposit box for years.

During that time, collectors were attempting to account for all 100 positions from the original sheet. Position 9 remained the lone stamp from the top row whose location had not been confirmed. Its identity was finally established in 1984, when the locket was photographed and the stamp was compared with examples that had originally surrounded Position 9 on the sheet. The stamp stayed out of the marketplace until after Dorothy Stickles, formerly Dorothy Nicholson, died in 2001. According to the Stack’s Bowers lot history, it sold privately for $90,000 in 2003 and changed hands again in 2009.

The locket was opened during certification in 2010, revealing another unusual detail. Despite the two stamps having been positioned gum-to-gum for decades, they had never become stuck together. The examination also made it possible to see Klein’s handwritten “9” on the back of the Inverted Jenny. Stack’s Bowers brought the locket to auction in May 2015, when it realized $164,500.

Eleven years later, the famous Position 9 returned to Stack’s Bowers and more than doubled that result, selling for $439,200.