Upside down Taupō stamp fetches huge price
The 1903 stamp with an upside-down picture of Lake Taupō. Photo: Mowbray Collectibles/supplied
A New Zealand postage stamp has sold for $260,000 - the highest amount ever paid.
The stamp dates back to 1903, featuring a misprinted picture of an upside-down Lake Taupō.
A US buyer purchased it at a Mowbray Collectables auction. The last time it sold was in 1998, when it went to New Zealand Post for $125,000.
It originally cost four pence.
The stamp was last publicly displayed in 2005 at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa's 'Stamped: Celebrating New Zealand's postal history' exhibition.
"The stamp was used in 1904 on a letter sent from Picton, Mowbray Collectibles said on its website. "It first surfaced in London in 1930, selling the following year at auction for just £61.
"It then vanished into a private French collection for half a century, only re-emerging in New Zealand in 1982, when it was displayed at the Palmpex exhibition."
Also up for auction this weekend were "a huge range" of the world's first postage stamps - the Penny Blacks from the UK - valued at up to $20,000 each, and "popular gold coins and medals from the New Zealand Wars".
Mowbray Collectibles founder John Mowbray said the Ministry of Culture and Heritage agreed the stamp could leave the country, if sold offshore.