Arts: International Exhibition

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Hundreds of thousands of silly little pieces of paper, oblong, square, three-cornered, printed in faded colors, smudged with ink marks, none of them bigger than a square inch or so, none of them very beautiful, and none of them the least use in the world. Such rubbish, said a woman with an umbrella, eyeing disdainfully a red and black oblong all by itself in a glass case ten times too large for it, such rubbish might as well be burned, and better. She turned away and, crossing a large white granite hall, found a taxi that would take her away as quickly as possible from the Grand Central Palace, Manhattan, and the International Collection of Postage Stamps which opened there last week.

If, in answer to the woman's thought, all the assembled stamps had been thrown into a fire, the conflagration would not have been great, but the resultant damage would have been in excess of 20 million dollars. Famed collectors everywhere had sent their collections; the President of the exhibition himself, Charles Lathrop Pack, beady-eyed and white-mustachioed, exhibited his fine group of early Victoria stamps (limited to the issues with the half-length and enthroned portraits of the Queen), a collection which formed the basis for a monograph which won a gold medal for philatelic research at a London exhibition.

Twenty-four judges worked to pick the championship and gold medal collections. Never before in the world's history had such a collection of expert philatelists assembled in one room. Prince Otto of Hungary, exiled in Spain, sent his collection. General F. Hegeman-Lindencrone of Copenhagen, 85, who specializes in Nordic stamps, stamps on the original envelopes, and the postal issues of Schleswig and Holstein, sent 2,000 of his rarest pieces. U. S. Postmaster General Harry S. New sent a government exhibition and put on sale (twelve days earlier than he had meant to) a new two-cent stamp to commemorate the Battle of White Plains. Colonel E. H. R. Green (son of the late Hetty Green), Charles N. Ams (whose collection of Gambia stamps is second to no other collection of Gambia stamps), Alfred F. Lichtenstein, Swiss stamp collector, Miss Ellen F. Nason of Claremont, N. H., collector of Arabian stamps, with all the special issues for Jeddah and Nejd —these and many more sent their best. But one and all, when they beheld a black and magenta stamp lying by itself in a case ten times too big for it, bowed in reverence. This stamp bears upon its breast in bold letters the words "One Cent." Its owner, Arthur Hind, of Utica, paid $32,500 for it. It is the most valuable stamp in the world. Should some one find, on an old letter, a big stamp with an octagon marked within its four corners, and a square inside the octagon, and in the square a schooner, full-rigged, with "British" in the sky above it and "Guiana" in the sea beneath, then the value of Mr. Hind's stamp would be lessened, for collectors would know that there were two such stamps in the world.