Robert A Siegel has recently conducted “2020 Rarities of the World” sale that offered to collectos’ attention a great variety of interesting philatelic items, including 5c Blue vertical pair on cover. The lot bears the rare 2-cent vertical experimental government coil with one of the finest pairs of the 5-cent imperforate. This is the first time the stamps have been reunited on this cover in more than half a century.
The first government coil stamps were experimental, and philatelists at the time were generally unaware of or indifferent to their existence. Sheets of 400 were printed and perforated in one direction. They were then cut into strips of 20 and hand-assembled into rolls for sale in vending machines. Only four rolls of 1,000 experimental 5c Blue coil stamps were produced, and the vertical format was never repeated.
5c Blue vertical pair on cover tied together by "Indianapolis Ind. Dec. 20 11:30AM 1908" duplex datestamp was addressed to "A. M. Travers Esq., Post Office Department, Washington D.C.". It was sent by William Pirtle Herod, an Indianapolis attorney from a prominent political family. He didn’t even realize the pair was so important as like most philatelists at the time, he probably did not regard experimental coils as separate issues. Many consider this item as one of the greatest covers in all of 20th century United States philately. It was sold for $110,000.
