Chats on Postage Stamps

by Frederick John Melville

These two appear to have been the leaders of the counterfeiting of their time, "those indeed who have made almost a trade of it"; but there was also a Brunswick dealer who "tried his hand at the Danish essays," and a few forged stamps were supposed to hail from Leipsic.

A couple of years later John Marmaduke Stourton, in a brochure "How to Detect Forged Stamps," gives evidence of a swarm of forgers cropping up in even our own country at Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle, and London, in Hamburg and New York, as well as the Swiss and Belgian forgers who still plied their traffic. The Glasgow productions were of the "facsimile" class, and were possibly manufactured with the well-intentioned but unwise endeavour to provide approximately correct coloured facsimiles of stamps which were too scarce to be readily accessible to all collectors. The "facsimile" has no doubt often been produced with the best of intentions by firms of high repute, but the protecting word "facsimile" or "Falsch," or other sign by which the true nature of the copy may be identified, has so often been removed for fraudulent purposes after it has left honest hands that there is no alternative in these days of later and fuller experience to define "facsimile," so far as it relates to Philately, as, in the words of my glossary, "a euphemism for a forgery."

It is, however, to be borne in mind by the student that in the beginning of Philately there was not entirely the same attitude towards the production of legitimate (if any could so be called) or honest facsimiles, and, indeed, a writer in one of the early journals, in proposing the formation of a philatelic society, suggests that one of the duties such an institution could properly fulfil would be the reproduction of choice editions (copies) of rare stamps for limited circulation! Also in the Stamp Collector's Magazine, whose proprietors and engravers were as free of just reproach as Cæsar's wife, we find the engraver so pleased with the illustration he has produced for that journal of the Nicaragua stamp of 1862 that he announces:—

"Nicaraguan Stamp.—Will be ready in a week. A beautiful proof of the Nicaraguan Stamp (equal to the original) will be sent for 13 postage-stamps. Only 75 proofs of this will be taken; each proof will be numbered, and then the block burnt. An early application is really necessary, 25 copies being already sold. Address...."

These "proofs," rarer, no doubt, than the originals, were endorsed editorially, and collectors unable to procure the original stamp were told they "would do well to provide themselves with one of these facsimiles." The astute Mr. Pemberton, however, took a very different view. "Although he tells every one that they are merely facsimiles and not the real stamps, we cannot but help thinking that he is acting wrongly; for less scrupulous dealers than himself will sell them as genuine.... Again, these imitations are by far the best executed of any we have seen. The regularly forged stamps are wretched in comparison with these, and therefore all the more caution will be required to detect them." So he proceeds to a detailed description of the small differences existing between genuine and imitation.

There is no royal road by which the collector can attain to the accurate and ready discrimination between the right and the wrong copies of stamps. Forgeries have multiplied enormously between 1863 and 1911, so that now the standard handbook by the Rev. R. B. Earée is a masterpiece of detail entitled "Album Weeds," occupying two large volumes containing nearly 1,300 pages of text. It would be idle to pretend that even the expert has every description contained therein "at his fingers' ends." Yet the expert is rarely deceived in a stamp, even when he has not access at the time to Mr. Earée's work or other references. I remember an early instruction, the only one that covers the subject, but I forget whence it comes. It was that if you study your stamps an imperceptible sense will come to you that will enable you at once to acclaim the true and to suspect if not denounce the false.

Beyond this I can only advise the reader that, as a complete novice, he would be unwise to purchase costly rarities and valuable stamps from unknown and irresponsible persons. The novice will remain a novice in these matters, unless he acquires some knowledge of the differences (generally readily distinguishable) between a stamp that is from an engraved plate and a forgery that is, say, lithographed or from a wood-cut. It is important to remember also—at least for the new collector—that strange though it may seem to him, stamps really do fetch what they are considered to be worth by collectors and dealers of experience, and that if rare stamps are offered much below the current quotation by individuals supposed to know their true worth, it may often be, and generally is, that the wares they have for sale are either forgeries or carefully mended copies of damaged originals.

There is little danger of the collector being much at the mercy of the forger if his transactions are confined to the reputable dealers, for these latter have done more to purify the honest trade in stamps than can, I think, be said of the dealers in the objects of other forms of collecting. They have expert knowledge on their staff, and access to highly specialised opinions and advice in the various branches of the subject.

Personally, I do not consider the forgery question nearly so serious an obstacle in Philately as in other crafts. Most active stamp-collectors are companionable with other students of the same subject, and there would be little opportunity for an Affaire Vrain-Lucas, in which during a period of several years a French autograph collector accumulated 27,000 autographs for about £6,000, mostly forgeries, and all from the same source, or for such a string of incidents as was exposed in the recent china case in Great Britain.

Forgeries of stamps are made either for the purpose of defrauding the Government or else for rifling the pockets of the stamp collector; these may be classed in two groups: (1) where a stamp is a forgery either in its entirety or in some added, as distinguished from "altered," material detail; and (2) where a genuine stamp is so altered as to apparently convert it into some other stamp. The first group are generally covered in the term "forgeries," the second being specially distinguished as "fakes." There is another class dubbed "bogus," or sometimes more elegantly timbres de fantasie, which comprises labels which are a pure invention, and never had any genuine existence at all.