THE STAMP FORGER’S ART

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18512, 24 March 1922, Page 2

THE STAMP FORGER’S ART

Stamp forging is by no means a new art (says L.S. in a London paper). As soon as postage stamps reached a high value the forger started his work. Forgeries are frequently found in old collections of stamps. In my own case I have four interesting forgeries that came from an album left to me by a relative. Two are stamps of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company, which, if genuine, might be worth anything from £5 to £ls. But at the date at which they were forged they could not have had a higher value than a few shillings. This seems a poor return for a really clever forgery. But at times the forger is content with small profits and quick returns. He even forges stamps with th© commercial value of a few pence, simply because it is possible to sell hundreds of them without any fear of detection. If the faked stamps are of high value the difficulty of disposing of them is greatly increased, although forgeries of oven the 1847 Mauritius, of which only ten copies are known to exist —its value runs into four figures—are not unknown. Perhaps th© most extensively forged of all stamps are the South American. Th© earlv issues of the States of Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay have been forged in great numbers both in Paris and in Montevideo. The cleverest cases of forging are where an old but not very valuable stomp is placed in a chemical bath which removes both colour and design. The forgery is then engraved, either by photography or by hand, on the original paper. Here the evidence by which the collector judges is all in order. Tho paper ie right, the perforation absolutely correct, and there can be no doubt about th© watermark. It is only by comparing th© design with that of a genuine stamp that th© forgery can be detected. In many issues a used stamp, one that has passed through the post, fetches a much higher price than a similar unused one. This provides an easy opening for tho forger, who has a knowledge of old postmarks. In a recent case an unused stamp was stuck on to an old envelope of exactly the same period, a postmark was cleverly faked, and detection seemed almost impossible. But the fake was noticed by a collector, who saw that the address on the envelope had been written with a modern steel pen instead of th© old-time quill.