The Upended Queen
India's greatest philatelic treasure is the 1854 4-anna red and blue, because it carries an inverted head of queen Victoria . This high value of the first set of stamps issued by the East India Company portrays Britain's Queen Victoria within an octagonal frame.
For many years, philatelists believed the error was the result of the frame being inverted. Since the stamps were printed on paper bearing an unusual coat-of-arms watermark which covered the entire sheet, the watermark position showed later experts that the head, and not the frame, was inverted. This unusual watermark also revelaed that most of the known errors came from the same sheet of inverted stamps, but that more than one sheet containing the errorswas printed.
A copy of the error was exhibited for the first time at a meeting of the Royal Philatelic Society of London in 1874. In 1899 several were obtained by Stanley Gibbons, including a cover with two single inverts cut to shape. They were later soaked off the cover, seprated and soald as singles.
The public frequently took the time and patience to cut these imperforate stamps to shape rather than cut them square, perhaps because pages of early stamp albums had the stamps printed and framed that way. Therefore, copies of the error cut square are worth considerably more than those cut to shape.
Thomas Tapling purchased a cover with two of the errors in 1890. These are now in the Tapling collection in the British Museum. Charles J. Phillips came across two copies of the rare invert while looking through a stack of correspondence from India. One of these was purchased by Henry J. Duveen, who later sold it to Alfred H. Caspary. This stamps realized $1,150 during the Caspary auction conducted by H.R. Harmer, Inc., in 1958. SCott catalog now lists those cut square at $60,000, while those cut to shape are priced at $16,000. ( These are not up to date prices)