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23.07.2012 - Unknown collector captures Audrey Hepburn
An undisclosed buyer has paid 99,500 Euros for one of the most sought-after German modern stamps.

It concerns a stamp that shows the image of the actrice Audrey Hepburn. It seems a steep price, but – as the seller, the firm of Richard Borek, states – it might still be considered to be a bargain or, in the words of Borek, ‘the best deal the collector ever made in his life’. Not long after the deal had been closed, the MICHEL stamp catalogue adapted its price for the Audrey Hepburn stamp upwards and put it on an impressive 150.000 Euros.
The Audrey Hepburn stamp (intended to be issued in 2001) is a so-called ‘non émis’, a stamp meant for normal postal life, but for some reason withdrawn beforehand and then destroyed. That the Hepburn stamp never made it as a ‘real stamp’ has to do with the objections a son of the actress made against the chosen photograph, which showed his mother smoking, an image he did not like at all. Deutsche Post had to concede and destroyed all of the (already printed) 14 millions copies of the stamp. That is, with the exclusion of those copies that had been handed out as specimen stamps. One of these surviving stamps, located at the upper left corner of a sheet of ten, is now in the possession of a (probably very happy) collector.