On April Fools’ Day, I’ve been pranked by my own (late) father and his stamp collection.

And, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I almost fell for it. In fact, I was getting ready to write a #stampoftheday post about how I had recently rediscovered that my father’s collection included four rare stamps issued in 1861 and eight more rare stamps, all issued in 1875 – which were reprints of stamps from 1857-1861 produced for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Together, it appeared that these two sets of stamp could be worth about $10,000!

I came across these stamps yesterday when I was rooting around trying to come up with a legitimate candidate for the #stampoftheday, frustrated that after 347 straight days of pulling stamp-rabbits out of my hat, I seemed to have hit a dead end. In the course of trying to find an appropriate stamp, I came across the fact that on March 31, 1973, the Mississippi River had flooded from the largest flow of water to flow down the river since the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

“I can work with that,” I thought as began to ruminate on a post that would explore natural disasters, the pandemic, and resiliency. The post would have drawn, in part, from a lunchtime talk I gave several years ago at an where then Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was launching a major project funded as part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative.

This was only a few years after the Boston Marathon bombing when, as one sign said, people were responding by adamantly asserting, “Boston is a tough and resilient town. So are its people.” So I started the talk by discussing my research into the question: when did the words “resilience” or “resiliency” first appear in The Boston Globe (and in what context)?

I found that between 1872 and 1959, the words only appeared about 40 times in headlines or the opening paragraphs of pieces in the Globe. One of the first came in a 1910 article about Michelin tires; another early use was a 1927 piece on “How to Achieve Beauty: Exercises for Resiliency and Flexibility of the Hands.” Other mid-20th century appearances were in articles about stocks and businesses; cars and tires; performers, athletes, and soldiers; and, in the 1950s, flooring being made out of new materials. The first time the word was used to describe the city itself was a 1959 article about the Globe’s new headquarters in Dorchester, which the headline noted, “Highlights a ‘New Look’ For Old Boston.”

To write this post, I needed a stamp that had something to do with the Mississippi River. A quick online search produced two options: a 1966 stamp honoring the “Great River Road,” and a $2 stamp, showing the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River. That stamp was issued in 1898 as part of a series of stamps released in conjunction with the Trans-Mississippi Exposition.

The 1966 stamp was out because I wrote about it several months ago. So I turned to the pages in my father’s collection with carefully mounted stamps from the 1898 exposition. But no stamp, probably because it’s pretty rare – a used stamp with small flaws retails for $750 on the Mystic Stamp website; an unused one with small flaws sells for more than twice that amount.

I was briefly flummoxed but then I remembered that I also have a large envelope with some older, more valuable stamps that my father bought in the 1970s or 1980s (or maybe the 1990s) when he started buying stamps but never got around to putting them in albums (though most of them are still on the display cards used by his stamp dealer).

But there wasn’t an Eads Bridge stamp.

Flummoxed again, I decided to look carefully at some of the stamps in that envelope to see if any of them had a connection with yesterday or today. And then, I got excited because I had just discovered the two sets of seemingly valuable stamps. There also was a third card, with two somewhat less valuable stamps from a series issued in 1869, including a 10-cent stamp with a shield and eagle which, as best anyone can tell, was first used on April 1, 1869. “Aha!,” I thought. “I have a two-fer. I can write about these valuable stamps on March 31 and the American shield and, on April 1, the eagle stamp (which, I would note, was part of the first two-color stamps issued by the US Post Office.”

After that initial excitement I realized that something literally didn’t add up. On each card was a price which is either what my father paid or what a list price that set the ceiling for any negotiations. And the price on the cards was significantly less than what the Mystic Stamp website said was the price of the stamps today. This struck me as odd because in general, prices of stamps have gone down, largely because demand has fallen as the number of active stamp collectors has shrunk.

In addition, there was something odd about how the stamps were identified. Every stamp has a number from the once ubiquitous Scott catalog. These had the right number but there was a letter after it. That letter, it seemed to me, must mean something.

So I did some more noodling and discovered that the letter was the key clue. In addition to the actual stamps, apparently there also was something called card proofs: stamps printed on heavy card stock created especially for collectors because (according to stamp collector Greg Waldecker in a useful online article) “the depth of color, the sharpness of the image and the cleanness of the finished product are vastly superior to a production run stamp.” What I thought were valuable stamps from 1876 were instead the result of one of several special print runs, done between 1879 and 1895.

Sure enough the stamps on my desk had unusually crisp images printed on heavy card stock. I imagine that at that moment, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson – the three men, who between them, are pictured on every stamp I was looking at except the eagle stamp—smiled and whispered, “April Fools!”

Slightly embarrassed, I put the stamps away.

However, I do get to have the last laugh. Although I don’t have the originals of most of the stamps mentioned in this post, I do have an original version of the 10-cent stamp with the shield and American eagle that was issued on April 1, 1869. That stamp, not all the imposters discussed above, is today’s “official” #stampoftheday.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.