Chats on Postage Stamps

by Frederick John Melville

"F. J. Melville, Esq."

A more scarce engraving, which was the basis of some of the most classic designs in the history of postage-stamps, is the mezzotint by Samuel Cousins, A.R.A., of the portrait of Queen Victoria painted by Alfred Edward Chalon, R.A., in 1837. The original picture was a present from the Queen to her mother, the Duchess of Kent, as a souvenir of Her Majesty's visit to the House of Lords to prorogue Parliament on July 17, 1837. According to The Athenæum, the original picture "may take its place as the portrait, whether in right of the likeness, which is faithful and characteristic, or in right of its artistic treatment." From the mezzotint Edward Henry Corbould, the son of the artist of the "Penny Black" of Great Britain, made a drawing in water colours, from which the engraver William Humphrys produced the fine miniature for the first stamps of New Zealand.

In a number of cases photographs have provided the subject for stamp vignettes, and here the collector is able, if he takes a little trouble, to procure copies for extra-illustrating his collection. The photograph of the Llandovery Falls in Jamaica, used on the picture stamp of that colony in 1900, was an unauthorised copy of one of a published series of local views; that of the Victoria Falls on the 1905 stamps of the British South Africa Company recently formed a frontispiece to The Stamp Lover (October, 1910). The subject of the quaint vignette on the British New Guinea and Papua stamps was engraved from a photograph taken by a naval officer, and I traced a copy to the collection of a returned missionary.

Bank-note and other engravings of a like character have provided copies for stamp pictures, and Lord Crawford has formed a truly magnificent historical collection of the United States stamps, in which his lordship, in the course of about forty volumes, traces each design to its inception, in some cases to the first rough pencil sketch. He endeavours to show every stage in the development of the stamp, and, as every philatelist should do, he follows the stamp through its period of currency, showing the different kinds of obliterations, the varying shades of successive printings, and where they exist re-issues, reprintings, and forgeries. His lordship's collections of Great Britain and of the Italian States are equally comprehensive, but that this manner of collecting is not entirely exclusive is evidenced by the number of collectors who have formed really worthy individual "association albums"—to borrow an expressive term—of the stamps of these same countries.

Proofs are comparatively easy of access, which, considering their relative scarcity, is surprising. The reason that they were neglected in the middle period of stamp-collecting was probably that the creation of a market for such items had led in some instances to an illegitimate supply by the employés of printing firms entrusted with the storage of Government dies. The misuse of stamp dies is rare now, most self-respecting Governments taking ample precautions not to admit of any improper use of their property. The opportunities for finds in the way of rare proofs are still plentiful. Stamp-collecting, though firmly established, is still young, and it is little over seventy years since the first adhesive postage-stamp was issued. A number of near descendants of the originators of the first postage-stamp are alive, and no doubt there are still treasures in the way of proofs among the little-valued waste of later stamp-engravers and designers. Shortly after the death of the engraver Herbert Bourne (1825-1907), I acquired practically the whole of his reliques in the way of proofs of stamp dies; but during his long life the engraver had done so many engravings that a little while prior to his death he had been burning the proofs he had saved to clear them out of the way. His son fortunately saved the thirty to forty items now in my collection, of which one of the most curious, if least in dimensions, is the extremely small head of King Carlos for the small opening in the frame of the picture stamps of Portuguese Nyassa. He appears to have done the die for the 1876 (June) issue of Spain, which stamps, printed in taille douce by Messrs. Bradbury, Wilkinson & Co., are a flat contradiction of the statements of both the Somerset House authorities and the Crown Agents for the Colonies. Each of these departments has averred that the recess-plate printing offers more scope to the forger than our paltry surface-printing, yet Spain, prior to 1876, had to change her stamp issues practically every year owing to the prevalence of forgeries making heavy inroads on the Government revenues. Yet the forgeries were of surface-printed issues, and this first Spanish issue in taille-douce engraving, printed in London from the die of a London engraver, was never forged to defraud the Government, neither have the stamps been successfully imitated to deceive the collector.

ENGRAVER'S PROOF OF THE QUEEN'S HEAD DIE FOR THE FIRST ADHESIVE POSTAGE STAMPS, WITH NOTE IN THE HANDWRITING OF EDWARD HENRY CORBOULD ATTRIBUTING THE ENGRAVING TO FREDERICK HEATH.