Bond trader to sell rare stamps for charity
Bill Gross, a billionaire bond trader who has acquired a reputation as a shrewd trader of rare stamps, will auction the Scandinavian portion of his international collection May 16 to benefit charity.
It will be the second time Gross sells a portion of his collection for charity. In June 2007, he auctioned his British stamps. He and his wife, Sue, then donated the entire proceeds, $9.1 million, to Mйdecins Sans Frontiиres, an international medical relief organization.
The recipient this time will be the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York. According to Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the institute, the money will be used to expand the programs activities in Africa, which include fighting malaria, building schools and clinics, increasing food production and ensuring safe water supplies.
The sale will be conducted in New York by Spink Shreves Galleries, and proceeds are projected to be more than $1 million. The British collection sold last year brought about double its estimate.
Tracy Shreve, who will call the auction, said that bidders might be more competitive because the proceeds were going to charity.
The Scandinavian collection includes more than 100 19th-century and early 20th-century rarities, some of them one-of-a-kind pieces that have been part of famous collections in the past.
Among those is a block of four of the first Finnish stamps, issued in 1856, with two of the stamps inverted in relation to the other two. That item alone is expected to bring $100,000 to $150,000.
Other rarities are an Icelandic 5-aur stamp from 1897 with a provisional overprint. The stamp was made in very small quantities when the regular 3-aur stamps ran out, and this one is the only mint example known to remain.
On Friday, Gross called stamps an “authentic collectible,” established over time and appreciating at least at the same rate as the local economy - 5 to 6 percent a year. “You dont get rich, but you do have some fun,” he said.
Gross noted that during the period when he bought many of his rare stamps, beginning in the early 1990s, prices were low. He said that while there have probably been better times than the present to find rare stamps at good prices, “collectors in their 40s and 50s and 60s dont have time to wait around.”
Gross said that he intended to sell his collections of Swiss and Canadian stamps soon. He said that, for the time being, he would keep his award-winning U.S. collection, the only one in the world known to include one of every stamp variety issued by the United States.
