Collection of a lifetime

Bill Gross got into stamp collecting after his mother spent years buying and stocking up sheets of stamps. She was setting them aside, hoping that, one day, they’d fetch enough money so she could send her son to college.

His mother’s stamps turned out to be worth less than the pennies she paid for them. But her boy did go on to college, only to become a billionaire bond trader.

Gross, a Laguna Beach resident and founder of the Newport Beach-based Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO), now owns some of the rarest U.S. stamps. He has just donated $8 million to the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington D.C. for the creation of a 12,000-square-foot exhibit space. It is to be called the William H. Gross Stamp Gallery.

He’s also lending the museum three items from his prized collection of philatelic objects. These items are a 10-cent George Washington stamp, dated July 2, 1847, a cover from the Pony Express mail service, and a bloc of four 1918 “Inverted Jenny” stamps.

Gross laments that, as with Beethoven’s symphonies, there’s an only finite number of the rarest U.S. stamps. He has a complete set.

“That’s the problem with stamps, once you fill in all the spaces, there’s not really any place to go,” Gross said.

“There’s nothing more to do in terms of the collecting aspect. That’s just the way it goes,” he said. “I faced the same problem with classical music 20 years ago when I recognized at some point, I would hear all that Mozart and Beethoven had created and that would be it. It’s not like Jay-Z or whoever creating something new. Nothing new is being created.”

Now, through his monetary gift and loan of his prized items to the Smithsonian, Gross hopes to share his love of stamps with others.

A valuable mistake

Gross’ collection is so valuable that, at auction, the bond fund manager bought a block of Inverted Jennies — similar to the block of Jennys he is lending to the museum — for $2.97 million.

The stamps are called Inverted Jennys because they bear the upside down image of a bi-plane, which resulted from a printing error. Only 100 of these prized stamps are known to have survived. A block, such as the four Jennys, is even rarer.