Rare Blue Z Grill Stamp Fetches $4.3 Million at Auction: A Philatelic Milestone

This Blue Z Grill stamp sold for $4,3866.00 at auction.

Robert A&period; Siegel Auction Galleries

Stamp collecting is all about the little things. While the famous Inverted Jenny stamp, which sold for over $2 million in 2023, is easy for a casual observer to recognize, it takes a knowledgeable philatelist with a keen eye to spot a Z grill stamp. A one-cent blue Z. Grill stamp considered the “world’s rarest stamp,” just sold at Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries for $4,366,000.

It’s not the design or color or year that makes this stamp so unusual. It’s the grill, a pattern of tiny indentations that prevents the removal of the cancellation. In the late 1800s, some people tried to wash the cancellations off stamps and reuse them instead of buying new stamps. To stop losing revenue, the federal government commissioned experiments to prevent this. In 1867, Charles F. Steel of the National Bank Note Company patented a device that made patterns of impressions in stamps, making it harder to wash off the cancellation. These patterns were called grills. They were used from 1868 to about 1872.

There were several different grill patterns, and philatelist William L. Stevenson published a classification system in 1916. He classified different grills by size and labeled them with letters of the alphabet. The most unusual type was the Z grill, distinguished by the shape of the impressed marks. He recorded only two known examples of Z grill stamps, and no more have been found since then.

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