The unique plate block. One of the most important items in all of philately. Illustrated in the Aristocrats of Philately sections of the Anphilex 1971 (p. A-4) and the lnterphil1976 (p. A-4) exhibition catalogues.

The unique plate block was one of the items retained by the original purchaser of the sheet of Inverted Jenny's, Colonel Edward H.R. Green. The plate block of eight was offered in a 1944 auction of part of the Green collection, where it was purchased for $27,000 by Amos Eno, who used the dealer Y. Souren as his agent.

Souren and Eno removed the left four stamps from the plate block, giving it its current format as a block of four. The block was sold in an auction of the Eno collection in 1954, where it was purchased by New Orleans dealers Raymond and Roger Weill for $18,250 on behalf of their client, Benjamin D. Phillips.

The Weills purchased the entire contents of the Phillips collection in 1968 for $4.07 million. The plate block was next offered at auction in 1989 by Christie's, who sold the Weill Brothers stock over a series of auctions. It was purchased at the 1989 auction by Kerby Confer, a publishing and broadcasting executive, for $989,000.

Mr. Confer retained ownership of the plate block until 2005, when he offered it for auction at Siegel Auction Galleries, where it sold to bond investor Bill Gross for $2,970,000. Mr. Gross's ownership was short-lived, as he traded it within a week to Donald Sundman of Mystic Stamp Company for the one-cent Z Grill. With the completion of the trade, Mr. Gross became the third person in history to own a complete collection of United States Stamps.

Mystic Stamp Company retained the plate block and used it for advertising and promotion until 2014, when it was purchased by Stuart Weitzman of shoe fame, fulfilling his childhood ambition of owning this great rarity.