15c-90c 1869 Pictorial Inverts, Plate Proofs on Card (120aP4, 121aP4, 122aP4, 129aP4). Huge even margins all around, bright colors and detailed impressions

EXTREMELY FINE SET OF THE 1869 PICTORIAL INVERT PLATE PROOFS. ONLY ONE SHEET OF 100 OF EACH WAS PRODUCED.

The card proof sheets of 100 of the four inverted high values of the 1869 Pictorial issue were prepared for and displayed at the Atlanta International Cotton Exposition in 1881. They were printed in response to the publicity surrounding the actual inverted stamps that began to appear in the 1870’s. The sheets were somehow acquired by James A. Petrie of Phillipsburg, New Jersey, at the close of the exposition. Petrie claimed that he rescued the inverts along with the trial color card proof sheets (the "Atlanta" trial color proofs) just before they were to be burned. For some years he tried to sell his find and in 1895 he began to advertise them in the philatelic press, finding no takers. In 1903 he sold them to James Ludovic Lindsay, the 26th Earl of Crawford, one of the great collectors of stamps, essays, proofs and philatelic literature at the turn of the 20th Century. In November 1915 the Earl of Crawford’s collection was purchased by John A. Klemann of the Nassau Stamp Company in New York. It was Klemann who eventually cut up the sheets.

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