Free B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery by B.B. Cantwell Page A

informative public
display of United States postage stamps knows about the Jenny!” Purdy fussed,
his liver-purple lips pursing. “It was an early 20 th -century stamp
showing a World War I biplane but it was accidentally printed with the plane
flying upside down. They sell to collectors for hundreds of thousands apiece!”
    Hester,
remembering her mother’s coaching in the days when she wore pigtails, silently
counted to 10 before responding.
    “Well, Mr.
Purdy, I have to excuse myself. You’ve seen me on the bookmobile so you know I’m
not the expert who staged this exhibition, but I assure you that my colleagues
pay the greatest attention to scholarly detail.”
    Swallowing hard,
she continued. “Still, even the best scholars are eager to learn more. What is
it you’ve discovered?”
     Eagerly seizing
his moment of tribute, Purdy brushed strings of hair from his eyes and dug into
a pocket of a leather briefcase he carried. He pulled out a magnifying glass
large enough to convince Sherlock Holmes that size mattered.
    “I brought this
because I wanted to savor the details of the Flying Canoe first-day cover on
display,” he simpered. “But imagine my surprise when I saw this.”
    He placed the
magnifying glass, as large as Hester’s palm, on the glass display case above the
first-day cover in question. In the envelope’s upper right corner was a postage
stamp with a cancellation reading “First Day of Issue.” On the left half of the
envelope, a meticulous engraving showed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark wading
through a cattail-edged marsh. Purdy stepped back and waved his hand for Hester
to take a look.
    From her
inventory duty, Hester knew a little about the famous Flying Canoe first-day
cover. The postage stamp it bore showed the two famous explorers paddling a
canoe at the mouth of the Columbia River. But through a printing error, a few
batches of the stamps showed the canoe up in the sky instead of on the river’s
surface, thus the stamp’s nickname.
    She brushed her
auburn hair behind her shoulder and bent to peer through the magnifying glass.
    “I’m sorry, I
guess I don’t know what to look for, it looks about as I expected – there’s the
canoe up in the sky!” she said with an appreciative chuckle.
    “But don’t you
see!” Purdy fumed. “Count them!”
    “Pardon?”
    “How many men
are in the canoe?”
    “Oh!” Hester
looked again. “There are, um, three.”
    “YES!” The
little man raised his arms in the air as if signaling a football touchdown.
    Hester looked
confused. Purdy saw that she didn’t understand.
    “Don’t you see?
The Lewis and Clark stamp of 1955 showed only Lewis and Clark in their canoe. Lewis
– and – Clark – and – nobody – else!”
    *    
*     *
    Fifteen minutes
later, in a quiet backroom of the McLoughlin Collection, Hester pored over the
provenance file for the first-day cover, which she had removed from the display
and brought along with her.
    The file noted
that Vincent van Dyke Jr., Pieter’s father and a son of a former governor, had
acquired the philatelic treasure in 1955 on the day the stamp was issued in
Astoria, Ore., a fishing and one-time fur-trading center at the mouth of the
Columbia River. Not far from Astoria, on the edge of a marshy slough seen
before only by local Indians, deer, beavers and myriad waterfowl, the Corps of
Discovery had spent the long, wet winter of 1805-06 in a tiny fort they had
built from scratch.
    Vincent Jr. was
one of only a few dozen collectors to get out of the post office that day with a
first-day cover before an observant 12-year-old complained about the printing
mistake and asked for his money back. Sales were then suspended.
    Hester was
amused: The file even noted that the release of the flawed stamps was blamed in
part on lax oversight by the local postmaster, absent from the ceremonies
because it was opening day of the local salmon-fishing season at the Columbia
River’s famed Buoy 10. Her