NEW YORK, Feb. 1 -- Post offices around the country had a tough time selling last year's postage stamps featuring Richard Nixon. That wasn't a problem for Christie's auction house in New York City, where spirited bidding Thursday ended with the sale of an extremely rare misprinted postage stamp of the former president for $16,675. The 32-cent stamp depicts Nixon's portrait off-center and his name printed upside down, a rare mistake called an invert that has only happened about 12 times in the history of U.S. postage stamps. 'The person who bought these stamps went to the post office to buy stamps for his letters. He was not a collector,' said Christie's spokeswoman Laurie Dodge. The North Virginia resident apparently used 40 of the stamps before noticing the misprint. He owns 160 of the misprints, but apparently only put one up for auction to gauge the market. The stamp sold for more than $6,000 above its pre-sale estimate. If the other 159 do as well at auction, the stamps could make the owner a multimillionaire. 'Holy mackerel,' said Michael Baadke, associate editor of Linn's Stamp News in Sydney, Ohio, when he learned of the sale. Baadke said the misprint probably occurred when a printing sheet was accidentally fed into a printer upside down. 'There have only been about a dozen examples of inverted stamps in the history of U.S. postage stamps, which were first produced in 1847,' Baadke said. The Nixon stamp ranks in rarity with the upside-down biplane stamp issued in 1918 and a 1979 stamp depicting an inverted candlestick.
The stamps were issued April 26, 1995, at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Calif. Eighty million commemorative Nixon stamps were produced, but they never caught on with the public, with some customers saying they weren't interested in buying a stamp featuring the president, who was forced to resign in 1974 following the Watergate scandal. So did Nixon's notoriety in life help jack up the price of the stamp? 'I think overall it adds to the stamp a little bit because he's a controversial president,' said Baadke. 'But as far as stamp collecting goes, any stamp that's an invert is fascinating.'
