3 Le Courier de l’Europe was a bilingual political bi-weekly published in London and Paris between the years 1776–1792. From 1784–1791, it was edited by Charles Théveneau de Morande (1741–1805), who famously engaged in an exchange of accusations and counteraccusations with Cagliostro.
CHAPTER 20. Postage Stamp Swindles
Today I’d like to speak about something that even the most learned and clever postage stamp experts have not been able to keep up with: fraud. Postage stamp fraud. In 1840 Rowland Hill, a mere schoolteacher at the time, invented the postage stamp, for which the British government would later appoint him postmaster general of England, knight him, and award him a gift of 400,000 marks. Since his invention millions upon millions have been earned with these little scraps of paper, and many individuals have made their fortunes with them as well. From your Senff, Michel, or Kohl catalogs you certainly know how much a single one of them can sometimes be worth.1 The most valuable of them all is not, as most believe, the twopenny “Post Office” from Mauritius, but rather a one-cent stamp from British Guiana, a provisional stamp from the year 1856, of which, evidently, only one specimen remains. It was printed at the local newspaper with the same crude printing plate used for shipping company advertisements. This single remaining specimen was discovered years ago by a young Guianese collector among some old family documents. It then found its way into the La Renotière collection in Paris, which was the largest stamp collection in the world. No one knows how much its owner paid for this stamp, but its catalog price is now 100,000 marks. Already by 1913 the collection it joined comprised over 120,000 stamps, and was estimated to be worth well over 10 million. Of course, only a millionaire could afford to amuse himself compiling such a collection. Whether or not it had been his intent, he earned millions more from his collection. Its beginnings go back to the year 1878.2 However, the beginnings of stamp collecting itself date back another fifteen years. In those days collecting was easier than it is today, not only because there were many fewer stamps; not only because things that are prohibitively expensive now were much easier to come by back then; and not only because one could much more easily collect them all, but also because there were no forgeries in those days, or at least, none perpetrated in order to deceive collectors. Those of you that read stamp journals surely know that new forgeries are written about as something quite ordinary, even expected. And how could it be otherwise? Stamps can be so lucrative and the world of stamps has become so vast that no one can keep track of it all. In 1914, before the countless war and occupation stamps appeared, there were no less than 64,268 different stamps.
So, forgery. You know that whenever anything is collected it will be forged, without exception. While forgeries intended to fool the more dim-witted can be rather coarse and haphazard, others are too intricate even for the greatest experts to spot, and still others are so well executed that it takes decades to reveal them as forgeries, if they’re ever uncovered at all. Many collectors, especially beginners, think they’re safe from forgery if they concern themselves only with used stamps. This is because a number of states, particularly the Papal States, Sardinia, Hamburg, Hanover, Heligoland, and Bergedorf, reprinted rare sets of stamps that were no longer in use, and delivered them directly to collectors. These reprints, or, if you will, forgeries are all characterized by the fact that they’re not postmarked. But this is a special case that does not hold true across the board. There is nothing more preposterous than to say, “This stamp is counterfeit, because it’s not postmarked.” It would be much more accurate to say: this stamp is postmarked because it’s counterfeit. For there are in fact many fewer counterfeit stamps that are not postmarked: for the most part, only those where the forger, if we can use this word, is the state. The private forger who dares to counterfeit an intricately designed stamp can surely replicate a simple postmark as well. And when he has finished his forgery, he looks it over once more, very closely, searching for any irregularity that he can then obscure by covering it with a postmark. In short, collecting only postmarked stamps would protect you from some reprints but not from the great majority of counterfeit stamps. Very few collectors know which country enjoys the greatest reputation among stamp forgers, in other words, where the most successful counterfeits are made. That would be Belgium. Not only do Belgians counterfeit their own postage stamps — most famously the Belgian five-franc stamp — but they’re equally willing to forge foreign stamps, such as the one-peseta German Morocco.
To offload their goods, the forgers have found a great trick that both earns them more revenue and ensures they don’t get caught. They explicitly advertise their products as what they are: fakes. In marketing the counterfeit stamps as non-genuine, they of course forgo the huge profits of other forgers. But because their buyers, for the most part, intend to do just the opposite with these newly acquired stamps, that is, to sell them on as real, the fabricators can ask considerable prices for their wares, which they state are not counterfeits but rather stamps reproduced for scholarly purposes. They send their offerings to small stamp dealers along with literature boasting of the flawless replication of their out-of-circulation stamps, their admirable execution of a brand-new technique, the stamps’ painstakingly faithful imagery, overprints, colors, paper, watermarks, perforations, and — let’s not forget — postmarks. To guard against such goods, large stamp dealers have proposed a sort of guaranty, or mark of authenticity, that clearly indicates which respectable firm has vouched that a given stamp is genuine. Yet others have quite reasonably objected, asking why the image on an original stamp should be disfigured with a company’s seal, no matter how small. Instead, valuable stamps discovered to be counterfeits should be marked with a seal of forgery, or branded, in other words. Furthermore, not everything sold as a “replica” is necessarily intended as forgery. The famous 1864 Penny Black from England, for example, was reproduced a couple of times by the state printing office for the collections of a few English princes. Those of you who remain stamp collectors later on will have your own problems related to forgery, which will teach you more than I’ve told you today, and you will gradually find means to help you in the struggle against counterfeits. Today I’ll mention the title of a single but very important book, the Handbuch der Fälschungen [Handbook of Forgeries] by Paul Ohrt.3
There are many cases of collector fraud, including the private and state exploitation of stamp collectors, that do not involve forgery. Above all there are the countries that, so to speak, live off the postage stamp trade. In earlier times especially, quite a few smaller states relied on the deep pockets of stamp collectors to improve their finances. The discovery of this peculiar source of income can be credited to an inventive resident of the Cook Islands. Not long ago the 10,000 to 12,000 inhabitants of this island were cannibals. Along with the first objects and tokens of civilization to reach these people came postage stamps ordered from New Zealand. They were very simple stamps, made of gummed paper outlined in block letters. Nevertheless, the big stamp dealers in America and Europe took great interest in these editions and paid handsomely for them. No one was more surprised than the people of the Cook Islands when such an easy and lucrative source of income suddenly presented itself. They immediately printed new sheets of stamps in Australia, which were different from the first ones in design and color. There are similar stories from many South American countries, especially Paraguay, and even from the little Indian principalities of Faridkot, Bengal, and Bamra. Even shrewder than the sovereigns who profited in this way were private individuals, like the engineer who delivered two million new stamps to Guatemala for free, in return asking only for all the series of old stamps that could still be found in the state printing office. It’s not hard to imagine how much money he would later make from selling them. When things were going badly for Germany at the end of the war, even the German Reichspost followed the example set by these exotic kingdoms and principalities, and quickly sold their supplies of colonial stamps to private collectors.