If you’re interested in a brief history of the one-cent stamp from 1856 that sold for $9.5 million yesterday at Sotheby’s, here’s an excerpt from a Life article about it when it was auctioned off that year for $280,000:

“The one-center was printed in February of the year as an emergency measure when the crown colony of British Guiana found itself suddenly short of proper printed stamps. Fearing its rough appearance would encourage forgeries, postal officials initialed each stamp sold. The initials ‘E.D.W.’ scribbled on the left indicate that Mr. E.D. Wright, an assistant postmaster, was the first man to sell the world’s most valuable stamp, which is postmarked ‘Demerara, Ap. 4, 1856.’

After having been used, most likely, as postage for a newspaper, the stamp surfaced in 1872 when a Demerara schoolboy named L. Vernon Vaughan found it while rummaging through an attic. Vaughan got six shillings for it from Neil R. McKinnon and used the proceeds to buy more brightly colored stamps.

Six years later, McKinnon sold his entire collection for $528 to Thomas Ridpath of Liverpool, who extracted the one-cent and peddled it for $744 to the world’s leading stamp collector, Count Philipp la Renotière von Ferrary, an Austrian nobleman living in France. The French government confiscated his collection as World War I reparations and auctioned off the one-cent in 1923. An agent reportedly representing King George V of England bid furiously, but at $32,5000 lost to Arthur Hind, an American tapestry manufacturer. After Hind’s death in 1933, the stamp was claimed by his wife as a ‘deathbed gift’ from her husband who had previously disowned her for alleged infidelities. She sold it in 1940 for the unheard-of price of almost $45,000 to Fred T. Small, an Australian living in America. Small kept the fact that he owned the stamp a secret and never even told his wife of the treasure he owned until after he made his 700% profit on the recent sale.

The one-cent British Guiana’s ‘provenance’ or historical pedigree has added incalculably to its value.”