Local expert believes stamps are real isle rarities
A local expert believes in the authenticity of two postage stamps on the mainland as treasured "Missionary" editions made in the kingdom of Hawaii in 1851, even though they came from the family of a known impostor.
The two stamps were among a set of 10 submitted for analysis by the granddaughter of George Grinnell, a Los Angeles collector. In 1922, a court ruled that a set of stamps sold by Grinnell as Missionaries were forgeries.
But this week, after laboratory analysis, a scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., concluded the two stamps to be genuine.
"I think they are real," said Don Medcalf, president of Hawaiian Island Stamp & Coin, who has studied the famed stamps -- real and fake -- for years. "These ones were never known (to exist) before."
Medcalf says George Grinnell may have used these two real stamps years ago to produce scores of duplicates. Other stamp collectors speculate that relatives of Grinnell may have recently spent as much as $10,000 to buy the stamps with hopes of profiting on worthless copies.
"That would be a neat little trick," said local businessman Thurston Twigg-Smith, whose family has owned several original Missionaries and plans to sell his last stamp at an auction next year. "The Grinnell descendants are playing with big stakes: They are sitting on a potful of money if they can get their Grinnells declared genuine."
How much money? In 1995, Twigg-Smith sold one of his 2-cent stamps on an envelope with a 5-cent Missionary for just over $2 million.
The Missionary stamps, made of extremely thin and fragile paper, were issued in the islands beginning in 1851 in three denominations: 2 cents, 5 cents and 13 cents. Collectors estimate there are no more than 200 original Missionaries left, and not all are in good condition. The 2-cent edition is the rarest, with about just 15 available.
Those who have seen the stamps released by Grinnell say they imitate Missionary designs, but appear to be printed with newer ink on different paper, bearing forged postmarks and cancels.
Fred Gregory, a longtime collector who has examined several of the copies made by Grinnell, said the two being studied at Rutgers are probably real 13-cent stamps because those are the most popular.
And although previous high resolution color scans of both stamps have pretty much confirmed their authenticity, Gregory still has his doubts.
"I will reserve judgment until someone knowledgeable about Missionary stamps examines them," Gregory, who runs the Web site www.hawaiianstamps.com, wrote in an e-mail yesterday. "The Rutgers finding is significant, but it still needs to be confirmed through traditional methods of physical examination, comparison and analysis."
