Fame, History Leave Their Stamp on Show
Marilyn Monroe was the sweetheart of the show, but the superstar would have been Richard Nixon, had he made an appearance.
It was the Great American Stamp & Coin Show in Van Nuys, now a regular Sunday event at the Masonic Temple.
Stamp sheets featuring the late Monroe are available at the local post office, but the one offered for sale at the show is not. It featured a flaw--the normal perforations between stamps were missing--and in the stamp world, flaws can mean big money.
That sheet, which would have retailed for $6, carried a price tag of $17,000. At least one collector thought the price too high.
“That’s a great stamp but it’s not an upside-down and split Richard Nixon,” the collector complained to the stamp’s owner, Maria Mather, who is also the organizer of the local show.
Mather didn’t agree, saying she felt lucky to have gotten a sheet of the flawed stamps. It was all part of the give and take of the show, which is the only one of its kind in the San Fernando Valley, she said.
The show is free to the public and on Sunday featured 22 dealers selling stamps and coins.
The fabled Nixon stamp featured the late president’s name upside-down and his image spit in two. Just one of those stamps sold at Christie’s auction house in New York in February for $16,675. Two hundred are known to exist, all originally bought at regular price by a non-stamp collector from Virginia.
This lucky person, a Christie’s spokeswoman said at the time, used 40 of the stamps before spotting the flaw. Only one has been auctioned so far.
The rest are being held back in an attempt to preserve their value.
Mather said a stamp’s value can depend on a number of factors in addition to flaws, such as rarity, age, condition of the backing and the subject’s historical significance.
Coins must meet similar criteria, according to Ted Koopman, a dealer at the show. With a coin, he said, history also matters, as does the scarcity and condition of the piece.
Two of his most prized possessions are a 50-cent coin dated 1861 that was minted by the United States Confederacy and a U.S. silver dollar from 1799. Each was being offered at the show for more than $1,000.
Sergio Morales, an amateur coin collector from North Hollywood, said he doesn’t have that kind of money.
He and wife Fulvia collect Mexican coins as a tribute to their parents’ homeland and to help their two young daughters understand their heritage.
“This is a good way to teach them their history,” Morales said. On Sunday, he bought a coin featuring a bust of Jose Morelos, a Mexican clergyman who continued the revolution against Spain after the execution of famed Miguel Hidalgo in 1811.