Lost Continental
United States postage stamp / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lost Continental is a light-purple 24¢ United States postage stamp depicting General Winfield Scott, printed around 1873 on vertically ribbed paper by the Continental Banknote Company. It is the only known copy of this 24¢ Scott stamp—among the many surviving examples—that can be positively identified as a printing by the Continental firm, and not by the National Banknote Company, which had originally produced this 24¢ issue three years earlier.[1] For more than a century, experts could not determine with certainty whether Continental had ever, in fact, printed its own version of this stamp—or, if it had done so, whether any of the copies it printed survived.[2] Conclusive evidence did not begin to emerge until a collector named Eraldo Magazzu discovered the Lost Continental while examining a lot of old stamps he had purchased in 1967. Much debate and analysis followed before the stamp, on the evidence of its paper-type, was finally certified as authentic by the Philatelic Foundation in 1992.[3] How many other copies of this Scott issue (if any) printed on normal paper by Continental still exist is a question that philatelists believe will never be answered. Despite this uncertainty about the stamp's actual degree of rarity, the Lost Continental sold for $325,000 at a Siegel Gallery auction in December, 2004[1] A photograph of the stamp appeared on the front cover of the catalogue for that auction;[4] on page 60 of the catalogue, a photograph of the Lost Continental's back shows the pencil mark "153", a Scott catalogue number that erroneously identifies the stamp as an example printed by the National Banknote Company.
Lost Continental | |
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Country of production | United States |
Date of production | ca. 1873 |
Depicts | Winfield Scott |
Nature of rarity | Unique copy proved to have been printed by the Continental Banknote Company |
No. in existence | 1 known |
Face value | 24 US¢ |
Estimated value | US $325,000 |