US Airmail inverted Jenny 24c 1918 issue

philately Philately (; ) is the study of postage stamps and postal history. It also refers to the collection and appreciation of stamps and other philatelic products. While closely associated with stamp collecting and the study of postage, it is possibl ...

, an invert error occurs when part of a stamp is printed upside-down. Inverts are perhaps the most spectacular of postage stamp errors, not only because of their striking visual appearance, but because some are quite rare, and highly valued by

stamp collectors Stamp collecting is the collecting of postage stamps and related objects. It is an area of philately, which is the study (or combined study and collection) of stamps. It has been one of the world's most popular hobbies since the late nineteenth ...

Characteristics

Invert errors, or "inverts" for short, most commonly arise when producing multi-colored stamps via multiple passes through the printing press. It is easy for a printing plant worker to insert a half-finished sheet the wrong way around, resulting in the inverts. Such an error being so obvious, nearly all misprinted sheets are caught and destroyed before they leave the plant, and still more are caught during distribution or at the post office before being sold. A much less common situation is for the invert to be embedded into the printing plate or stone, most famously the case for the Inverted Swan of early Western Australia. An invert may be characterized as an "inverted center" or "inverted frame" when the underlying paper is

watermark A watermark is an identifying image or pattern in paper that appears as various shades of lightness/darkness when viewed by transmitted light (or when viewed by reflected light, atop a dark background), caused by thickness or density variations i ...

ed or otherwise carries a basic orientation. It is possible for a single-color stamp to be inverted relative to watermark, but this is called an " inverted watermark" rather than an "inverted stamp". Depending on the positioning of stamps within their sheet, the invert may be perfectly centered (as with the Inverted Jenny), or offset. Not all inverts are spectacular. The Dag Hammarskjöld invert of 1962 consists only of a misprinted yellow layer, and it is not immediately clear that the white area is not a deliberate element of the design. Early Danish

post horn The post horn is a valveless cylindrical brass instrument with a cupped mouthpiece. The instrument was used to signal the arrival or departure of a post rider or mail coach. It was used by postilions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Use and co ...

issues have an ornate frame that is almost perfectly symmetrical, and an inverted frame can be detected only by minute examination.

Overprint An overprint is an additional layer of text or graphics added to the face of a Postage stamp, postage or revenue stamp, postal stationery, banknote or Ticket (admission), ticket after it has been Printing, printed. Post offices most often use ...

s may also be inverted. Many of these are common, since the expedient nature of many overprints means that the production process is not so carefully controlled. Rare inverts often have significant monetary worth. Inverted Jennies have long sold for over US$100,000 apiece, and the St. Lawrence Seaway inverts of Canada approach those numbers. High prices for inverts have tempted printing company employees to steal misprinted sheets from the printing plant and attempt to pass them off as genuine, as in the 1996 case of the " Nixon invert".

An inverted invert

In 2013 the U. S. Postal Service offered a six-stamp souvenir sheet commemorating the famous Inverted Jenny issue. These stamps replicated the famous upside-down airplane image, but did not duplicate the original 24¢ denomination, instead being valued at $2. To publicize this issue, the Postal Service announced that one hundred sheets bearing six non-inverted Jenny images had also been printed and were being randomly distributed, ensuring that a few fortunate customers who had ordered the normal sheet would instead receive an inverted invert of far greater value. These non-inverts began appearing in public auctions in 2014, fetching high prices.