1926 International Collection of Postage Stamps

Round Up reader Nick Blackburn sends along an interesting archived article that appears on the Time magazine website about the "International Collection of Postage Stamps" that was held in 1926 in New York City.

According to Time, one of the attendees felt the exhibition had, "Hundreds of thousands of silly little pieces of paper, oblong, square, three-cornered, printed in faded colors, smudged with ink marks, none of them bigger than a square inch or so, none of them very beautiful, and none of them the least use in the world."

"Such rubbish", said the woman, eyeing disdainfully a red and black oblong all by itself in a glass case ten times too large for it. She thought it all might as well be burned."

"If, in answer to the woman's thought, all the assembled stamps had been thrown into a fire, the conflagration would not have been great, but the resultant damage would have been in excess of 20 million dollars."

Oh, by the way, the stamp (which is shown above) that woman was referring to was the "British Guiana 1856," the world's rarest and most valuable stamp at that time!

To read the entire article, click here.