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| Invert (STAMP PHOTOS FROM SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION NATIONAL POSTAL MUSEUM ARAGO WEBSITE, WHICH IS COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT OF AND NOT ASSOCIATED WITH "HENRY'S DAILY FACTOIDS.") |
In 1962, the United States Post Office Department issued a yellow, black, and brown commemorative stamp honoring Dag Hammarskjold, who had been the Secretary-General of the United Nations and who had died in a plane crash in the previous year. New Jersey jeweler Leonard Sherman was extremely jubilant when he obtained a sheet of the stamps from the post office and discovered that the yellow color on his sheet had been printed upside down. Sherman realized that previous examples of this type of inverted printing error in other issues of stamps had made those items worth incredible sums of money.
Unfortunately, Sherman should have kept his mouth shut and let the smoke clear before he announced his discovery. Postmaster J. Edward Day, upon hearing about Sherman's find, remarked snarkily that, "The Post Office Department is not running a jackpot operation." Day promptly ordered the printing of an additional 40 million stamps, all with the yellow color upside down, in order to destroy the rarity of Sherman's stamps and to screw him out of his good fortune.
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