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    Forgeries of Common Stamps after World War I: Eastern Front, Balkans, Caucasus
    Forgeries of Common Stamps after World War I: Eastern Front, Balkans, Caucasus
    Forgeries of Common Stamps after World War I: Eastern Front, Balkans, Caucasus
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    Forgeries of Common Stamps after World War I: Eastern Front, Balkans, Caucasus

    By Mr. P. Clark Souers

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHillcrest Media Group
    Release dateDec 31, 2016
    ISBN9781635055733
    Forgeries of Common Stamps after World War I: Eastern Front, Balkans, Caucasus

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      Book preview

      Forgeries of Common Stamps after World War I - Mr. P. Clark Souers

      Table of Contents

      1. Introduction

      2. Russia

      3. The Baltic

      4. North-Eastern Europe

      5. South-Eastern Europe

      6. The Balkans

      7. North and Eastern Caucasus

      8. Armenia

      References

      Issued under a Creative Commons

      License 4.0 Attribution-Share Alike

      CC-BY-SA

      ISBN-13: 978-1-63505-573-3

      Printed in the United States of America

      1. Introduction

      It had been almost a hundred years since Napoleon’s mega-war, and people had forgotten the violence. So World War I flickered on in 1911 when Italy invaded Libya and threw out the Ottoman Turks. The Balkan countries saw their chance to rid themselves of the Ottomans and the First Balkan War erupted in 1912. With the Ottomans gone, the Balkan countries turned on each other in 1913 in the Second Balkan War. In 1914, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in the Balkans started the main event- a battle between gigantic adversaries who had had locked themselves in through badly considered treaties. The long, corrosive war destroyed kings, caliphs and aristocrats and their thousand-year way of life.

      1. BB>. Libya, 1912-1922, Scott under $20,1-9. It is only fitting that the place where it all started has forged overprints on genuine Italian stamps.

      Left and 2nd: The genuine stamp has crisp lower case letters.

      3rd and right: The forgery is on a dark colored stamp so it is hard to see, but the letters are all upper case, so it is not a good try.

      Lurking in the background is the possibility that a forger got the font and the case correctly, but this country and time is not as popular as the material to come later.

      * * * *

      A catastrophic outcome was the seizure of Russia by the Bolsheviks, which led to a civil war from 1917 to 1923. Lenin became possibly the most troublesome single person of the 20th century by seizing Russia and imposing a Communist government, which might have faded away but was instead re-energized by being attacked and then defeating the Germans in WWII. Then, the big winners, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., faced each other for another 45 years in the Cold War, which took place all over the world by proxy without the two main forces ever meeting. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, many of the dead countries the Bolsheviks had conquered came back to life in the 1990’s.

      The 1920’s were unique because people expected that a wonderful new world would emerge, but they got only Fascist darkness, and another World War came to destroy what little past remained. Because of the bad decisions made after WWI ended, plus bad luck, WWII was a natural next event. For the history of the post-WWI period in these countries, I suggest my e-book Chaos and Identity.

      2. All the colored battle-line countries had forged stamps after WWI, from Finland in the north to Albania in the South and Azerbaijan in the east.

      * * * *

      I have found it enthralling to view the post-war WWI struggles and hopes as shown through the stamps of the 1920’s. So many dreams of new identities, all to be smashed by the next world war, but some to be resurrected after the Cold War ended. Many of these stamps are cheap and can be had on Ebay at low prices, if the buyer has the discipline to wait for a good deal. A collector must have a catalog, because many sellers ask 10 or 100 times catalog value, a plague almost as bad as forgery.

      Money was in short supply in the 1920’s and stamps were like money. In many countries where the real money was almost worthless, stamps could be bought and resold abroad to collectors of the richer countries. Nobody would fake a modern stamp because a century of affluence has made it a trivial pursuit.

      I use Ray Ceresa’s definition, where a fake is a completely redrawn stamp, but a forgery is a genuine stamp with a false overprint. The word reprint pops up all the time as being something that sounds all right. However, a real reprint uses the original plates, and so is usually just a resupply of legitimate stamps. Almost nothing in this book was reprinted, and so the reprints are just counterfeits. We do have fantasies, which seems a strange term, because nobody puts out 10,000 copies of a stamp just for fun. Every oddball stamp in this book was created for the purpose of making money.

      Worse yet, there is no word either for a truly maligned area of stamps: those that were really intended for postage and national prestige but didn’t get there in time, either because the government fell or inflation wiped them out. Some of them, like first Essayen and Erivan in Armenia, are catalogued in Scott, showing that the postal rule is not always followed if the stamps are famous enough. For me, there is a big difference between a postage stamp intended to be used and one made solely for profit, even if issued by a legitimate authority. This includes, in my opinion, many commemorative stamps today, which are dutifully shipped to post offices so they count for Scott, but the sole purpose is to make money from collectors.

      Common means easy to find on Ebay today and cheap, with a maximum of $10-20 a stamp, after ignoring the outrageous prices put up by ignorant sellers. For the common stamps, I define three kinds.

      1) AA>. This is a stamp where, given the right information, a genuine stamp can be found with almost complete certainty. This usually applies to fake stamps, where the entire design has been redrawn, but the faker made a mistake somewhere. Varro Tyler’s Focus on Forgeries (2000) concentrates on this kind of stamp. It is often possible to look on the magnified pictures on Ebay and tell which are fakes just based on some key point. This is the kind of certainty that stamp collectors like. In this study, I find that many of Tyler’s fakes do not appear on Ebay, nor do other famous fakes. I see no evidence that dealers have upgraded to selling only legitimate stamps, so the only explanation is that these fakes never were plentiful in the first place. Super-collectors noticed but the modern marketplace was never flooded with them.

      2) BB>. This stamp comes with considerable information but not enough to be ever be entirely sure. Most stamps here have forged overprints with enough complexity and style so that variations can be noticed and described. Many of these forgeries have been studied and the key elements to look for written down. If the buyer goes through the steps to check, there is a good chance that the stamp he buys may be genuine. Ray Ceresa on the front of his publications says

      Expertise your own stamps and beat the forgers and the Crooked Dealers on Ebay.

      For BB>, there is a chance that this might work.

      3) There will be information here, but it will never be enough, even though the stamp will have passed certain initial tests. This category contains even more overprints, which may have issued in many varieties and which are so simple in form that forging them was easy. Many of these have never been studied, or the

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