See RED TEXT ABOVE for world wide BANK TRANSFERS by WISE, PayPal also available. Contact on WhatsApp on 0066 0823715197
| Country: All Subject: Forgeries & Fakes Clear | Sort: Newest listed first |
High priced postmarks on catalogued stamps will always attract the forger and it is no surprise that forged cancels exist in all shapes and sizes on GB used abroad stamps. Those wishing to benefit financially from their endeavours have cleaned manuscript cancelled REVENUE issues and applied forged cancels to make them look postally used. Apart from those two groups the village cancels for all of the British West Indies remain largely unscathed (and virus free!). If you look to Bermuda numerals on QV issues you will be hard pressed to find any forgeries as no catalogue value was ever applied to them. Bob Topaz, in the USA, however produced his rarity chart for Jamaica numerals back in 1967, and in 1981 added £ sterling premiums to all the known combinations. Some of the rarest of the Topaz combinations may not exist at all unless in forgery/fake form as one keen individual took a fancy to forging Jamaica numerals on what would appear to be almost exclusively OFFICIAL issues, many with bluish ink tinge. Whether this was a result of the Topaz pricing, or whether they were prepared to be included in the counts supplied by collectors to Topaz we will never know. I stumbled across these as they appeared in bulk in a Jamaica numeral collection auctioned in the UK which I recognised as belonging to an American collector with initials ABN, possibly a totally innocent party. Around about the same time, perhaps earlier or later, I purchased the Charles Winand collection of Jamaica numerals and noted that a few forgeries from the same stable had found their way onto his album pages. The fakes from the two collections were eventually merged and set aside, and now are presented for the first time. If genuine the group would have been worth a small fortune as most are listed as rare, very rare, extremely rare. For the time being these are held safe, and the illustrations now provided should help to act as a safeguard to collectors in the future.
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
Although I have massively long text files of cancels I have handled, or seen, I do not have any postmark collections of my own. Written details of St. Vincent abbreviated and extended cds, with their incorporated dates and differing coloured inks in places are easy to understand, but even with years of experience I often stumble when it comes to the commonest obliterators on common stamps in my trying to remember just how common, or how scarce, they actually are. As a consequence I have recently undertaken trying to get an illustration of every different St. Vincent possibility on every different issue up to the end of KGV. The attached page for the PB QV 1d drab shows how far I have currently reached, and the item which is probably less common than all the others is the strike of the black vertical "A10" - which I would have overlooked thinking it much commoner!!
;)
Yes! The left half of the KG6 ½d Fresh Water Lake definitive is UNDENOMINATED and therefore could not reflect a ¼d denomination. Two covers are known to me and I am curious as to whether the ROSEAU */FE 9 40 and */FE 19 40 cds are genuine! The PAID AT NEVIS Crowned Circle cover is completely bogus albeit the QV 1d carmine stamp is genuine. The author being well aware that genuine strikes of both the Crowned Paid and Nevis cds have an oily appearance at this period has cleverly used his paint brush to simulate the oily stains within the Nevis despatch cds and soiled the cover at top left for good measure to simulate toning. The ENGLISH HARBOUR backstamp is also bogus and on similar covers the author often just used the day slug in different dates like the Roseau cds's. The PAID at NEVIS crowned circle appears on the QV 1d carmine and horizontal pairs QV ½d dull green, but only as "loose" stamps, no genuine covers existing. So why not make one!! To me there exists a similarity in the handwriting style of the Nevis cover and Dominica FE 19 40 cover, and the style of the cds's look as if they have come from the same stable.
;)
The attached article was written for the British West Indies Study Circle journal and appeared in the June 2015 issue. John Tingey has his article on this cover scheduled for the August 2015 edition of "Stamp & Coin Mart" written in the form of an Arthur Conan Doyle "whodunnit" (should go on sale approx. 12th July).
;)
;)
;)
;)