The Strange Saga of the World's Most Valuable Stamp

When I was growing up in stamp collecting, it was the British Guiana 1856 one cent Magenta that fired our imaginations as the rarest stamp in the world.

Today, the honor goes to the 1858 Sweden Treskilling Yellow, which sold for $2.5 million Swiss Francs in 1996.

It is a member of a series of five definitives issued in 1855 with the Royal Coat of Arms as the design. The denominations ranged from 3 to 24 skillings banco. The 3 skilling was printed in blue-green, the 8-skilling in yellow-orange.

We don't know exactly what happened, but a plausible theory is that somehow one of the cliches for the 8-skilling plate was damaged and mistakenly replaced with a 3 skilling cliche.

We also don't know how many of these 3 skilling stamps were printed. But the error wasn't spotted. Three years later the Skilling was replaced as Sweden's currency by the Ore.

The Treskilling Yellow was turned up by a fourteen year old schoolboy rummaging through his grandmother's attic in 1886. It went through a frenzy of buying and selling and in 1894 found a home in Philip von Ferrary's collection, at the time the world's largest stamp collection. It was later auctioned by the French government, wound up in the collection of a Swedish Baron and then in the collection of Romania's King Carol.

In 1940 the Swedish stamp was onboard the train laden with treasure (a Rembrandt painting, priceless jewels) which hurtled the "Playboy King" and his mistress to exile from the Nazis. As the train approached the border of Yugoslavia, it was attacked by Romanian fascists, who riddled cars with heavy gunfire while the king and his mistress spawled on the floor in search of safety.

Ten years later, the king had the auction firm Harmer put the rarity on the block, where it was sold to a Belgian real estate magnate.

Today the stamp rarity is owned by a group of private investors who are represented by a Danish stamp dealer, Thomas Hoiland, who acquired in a private sale after the buyers who purchased it at auction failed to pay for it.

For years stamp collectors have searched for another example... none has turned up.

And for collectors who have little or no time for damaged stamps... this rare stamp isn't exactly VF material. It has a tear and the top edge has been reperforated.