Scott # 1203 Variation (1962 Dag Hammarskjold Issue)

I thought I'd update this thread with a question.

While most collectors will know of the story behind this stamp and the US intentionally printing the "inverted background" so as to deliberately devalue the original "error", I was reading a recent commentary suggesting that as a result of that fiasco, "a court decision ruled this act was illegal..."

Does anyone know the story behind that court decision? Did it apply only to that stamp issue? In other words, if the USPS were to inadvertently issue stamps today with a known error, would that court ruling prohibit them from intentionally flooding the market with an "error" stamp so as to devalue the original mistake?

Didn't they do just that with the Legends of The West stamps?

I recall that the Legends of the West sheet was reprinted with the error and the resulting sheets were sold by a lottery system to collectors. (right???)

Correct. And in that case, they did not "flood the market" with the error, but rather they sold a limited number by lottery, so a lot of collectors who wanted them still missed out. Today, they still command a sizable premium over the non-error variety.

It's a bit of a different situation for the Dag Hammarskjold issue, though. In that case, the error was issued in such quantities readily available to anyone, so as to devalue any philatelic premium placed on it.

Actually, now that I think about it, perhaps the circumstances surrounding the Legends of the West error was decided upon based on the lessons (or legal findings) learned by the earlier Dag Hammarskjold error.

The post office did not "reprint" Legends of the West error sheets; they sold off some of the inventory that was withdrawn from sale.

Ok, so I have been moving along with my US album - I am truly enjoying it...but one thing that annoys me :) is I always seem to only be missing one or two from some of the pages/sets.

I was going through another pile and I think I may have the inverted Dag Hammarskjold after all - so annoyed that I could not complete that page a couple days ago. Can you confirm that I am correct? I see that white bar next to the building and the yellow over the margin.

yes, the ones you show with the white bar next the UN building are the invert.
To make matters just a little more complicated, when the white bar is at the right of the vertical part of the building and directly over top the roof, that is the most common variety of the invert printing.
The first vertical column of the sheet was different, with white all around the building.

I'll fish out my example of the first column variety and scan in in a couple minutes and edit it in for you.

Here it is. So on a full sheet of the invert, 10 stamps looked like the following. and 40 looked like yours. There's analysis of this at length on the first page of this thread. A couple months ago a dealer mailing me a purchase covered the envelope with inverts, including this one. Fun.

Yes, that is the Hammarskjold invert.

Awesome thank you for the confirmation:)

Excellent information jleb1979 I had not read about the "10" stamps. Yes it is fun :)