A tiny, ungummed scrap of 19th-century paper just sold for $525,000. The 5-cent 1875 Continental Special Printing stamp, featuring a portrait of President Zachary Taylor, changed hands on September 24 in a sale conducted by Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, according to postal records cited in the sale.
A Rarity With Just Nine Copies Available to Collectors
The auction house, as reported by AL.com, described the stamp as one of the rarest United States stamps in existence. Eleven copies of the stamp are known to survive, but only nine remain available to private collectors — one is held by the New York Public Library and another by the Philatelic Foundation, per the same report. Separately, Siegel Auction Galleries' own census records, as reported by Linn's Stamp News, put the known total at 10 copies, with the New York Public Library's example drawn from its Benjamin Miller Collection and currently on loan to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.
An auction catalog had estimated the stamp would sell for roughly $500,000, per postal records, and the stamp previously appeared on the market in 1989, according to that same catalog. Its most recent sale price of $525,000 lands comfortably above that early estimate, reflecting the steady appetite among collectors for pieces with this level of scarcity.
Born for a Centennial Celebration, Sold Only by Mail
The special-printing program that produced this stamp was established in 1875 during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant and continued through the administration of Chester A. Arthur in 1884. The Open Stamp Commons notes that the U.S. Post Office Department created the program specifically to reproduce every previously issued U.S. postage stamp for display at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, while also manufacturing limited extra copies for sale to collectors. Those reproductions reached back to older stamp issues dating to 1847, as well as issues from 1857-1860, 1861-1866, and 1869.
The stamps were never distributed through regular post offices. Instead, per Siegel Auction Galleries, buyers could only order them directly through the Office of the Third Assistant Postmaster General in Washington, D.C. That restrictive mail-order system meant just 317 of the 5-cent special-printing stamps were ever sold, a scarcity baked in from the very start.
Scissor Cuts and a 19th-Century Photograph Behind the Design
Because the special-printing sheets lacked standard guide margins, postal clerks separated them by hand rather than along perforations. The Swedish Tiger notes that roughly 80 percent of surviving Bank Note special printings show evidence of being cut apart with scissors, a trait experts now use to help authenticate genuine examples. The same source reports that the central portrait on the stamp was engraved by the Continental Bank Note Company from an 1840s photograph of Zachary Taylor taken by Mathew Brady, the historic photographer whose work shaped the look of several early U.S. stamp designs.
Taylor, the 12th U.S. president, served from 1849 until his death in 1850. Stamps bearing his likeness have circulated through some of the most prestigious American collections; Linn's Stamp News reports that historical copies of this particular 1875 printing have passed through the collections of Robert Zoellner, Gary Petersen, and Nelson Berman. The 2023 Scott Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps and Covers, also cited by Linn's, carried an italicized market valuation of $450,000 for the stamp — a notation that, in catalog terms, signals an item too infrequently traded for standard pricing.
How It Stacks Up Against Stamp-World Record Breakers
The $525,000 price tag is substantial, but it is dwarfed by other recent sales handled by the same auction house. In November 2023, Siegel Auction Galleries set the record for the most expensive single U.S. postage stamp ever sold when a mint-condition 1918 24-cent Inverted Jenny error stamp realized $2,006,000. The following year, the house auctioned the landmark collection of billionaire investor William H. Gross, headlined by an 1868 1-cent Z Grill stamp estimated between $4 million and $5 million.
Those figures put the Zachary Taylor stamp's sale in perspective: it is a genuine rarity, but one among several tiers of classic U.S. philatelic prizes that continue to draw seven-figure interest from collectors with deep pockets and an appreciation for 19th-century postal history.
