Stamps

Fake Philately

Since the mid-1800s, stamp collecting (philately) has ranked among the world’s most popular hobbies. England introduced the world’s first postage stamp, the Penny Black, and by the mid-1860s most industrialized countries were issuing postage stamps of their own. Stamp collecting occurred as early as the 1850s, but many stamps were rare, expensive, or difficult for people to acquire. Replicas/facsimiles therefore became popular, especially among younger collectors.

It is in this context that Spiro Brothers, a prominent lithographic firm in Hamburg, Germany, began to replicate international postage stamps. It proved to be a lucrative business. The firm printed approximately 500 different types of stamps over a period of fifteen years. Information about their replicas has been widely published since the 1870s, but even serious collectors can sometimes be fooled, particularly if the replicas have been modified with the intention to deceive.

Provenance

Stamps rarely have any provenance unless they have been owned by an important collector. Nothing is known about the history of ownership of these stamps.

Connoisseurship

Although the Spiro Brothers facsimiles made no major alterations to the image, the company used a different technique to print them. Genuine stamps were engraved, but the forgeries are lithographs. Another difference is that the forgeries do not have gum on the back. The perforations on the originals are sharper, due to the stiffening effect of the gum. Although fake stamps can sometimes be identified through differences in the paper, the Spiro Brothers created these facsimiles soon after the originals were issued, so the paper is similar.

Verdict

The stamps made by the Spiro Brothers are replicas, but they did not intend to deceive. In later hands, however, such replicas have often been sold as genuine by unscrupulous dealers out to fool unsuspecting collectors. Even some sophisticated dealers have mistaken Spiro Brothers facsimiles for the real thing.