Monday 21 May 2007

Fakes and Forgeries


The problem of faked, forged and repaired stamps has existed for more than a century and more than once I have during recent conversations with elderly, experienced collectors heard the remark: “Here they are again, those forgeries; But there is no reason getting nervous! Collectors know them and will not get cheated.”

The stamps shown above could be such forgeries. As far as I know they were produced by the brothers Spiro in Hamburg as early as in the 1880’ies. That is about 30 years after the issuance of the originals from Schleswig-Holstein. It is probably true that looking back just 10 years collectors would have been thoroughly familiar with these forgeries. But are they today. I don't think so.

The many new stamp auctions on the Internet have made the problem resurface because those auctions reach out to buyers, who are not able to benefit from of an experienced group of collectors in their neighbourhoods and therefore risk getting cheated. Having said this, I regard the development that is taking place on the Internet to be a highly positive one, because it gives collectors lots of possibilities to expand and diversify their interests for philately which simply did not exist in the past.

Unfortunately the efforts made by the big auction houses to secure dealings among collec­tors without getting cheated are insufficient. E.g. in accepting so-called ”private auctions”, which hinders experienced collectors in giving the less experienced collector a friendly hint that the item he or she is bidding on is probably a forgery, some auction houses close their eyes to the problem. However, one must not generalise, because some houses do handle the problem through their return policy. I pity those firms who do not attend to the problem, however, because a lack of effort to secure safe dealings will hardly attract more satisfied customers.

Attention towards the problem is growing, however. Efficient countermeasures are homepages devoted to well known forgeries whereto collectors can turn when they feel they are faced with a possible problem.
www.fakebase.dk is such a site having been developed on an entirely voluntary basis with the help of observant collectors, who has experience in a specific field or know where to find relevant information about forgeries.

As stated at www.fakebase.dk : “The purpose of FakeBase is to provide a forum, where it is possible to get and exchange information on falsifications, reproductions and 'improvements' of Danish philatelic material. Its main database contains images and descriptions of registered objects. Users can add their own objects and comment on the existing. It also has an alert database, which contains active online auction objects, which are believed to be fakes etc, and where the information does not explain this clearly. New objects added will get the status of 'not evaluated', until the users of this site add their evaluations. Based on these inputs, the objects will be marked as good or bad.”

Michael Appel, the conscientious “father” of fakebase, deserves great praise for his initiative, which maybe ought to be a task for the Danish Philatelic Society. I hope that Michael will continue to be able to keep up his very popular site in the years to come and with a continued broad support from collectors.

Saturday 19 May 2007

Welcome to My first Blog

On the newsgroup "fr.rec.philatelie" I met "Christian", who informs the group, that a new blog for stamp collectors had been created at the French newspaper Le Monde. Now this blog is long gone, but looking at it I got the idea to start my own blog about "philately", of course. I had however to admit to myself, that "blog" is still a word that I am not quite familiar with. I therefore looked it up at Google.

The name "blog" is a truncated form of "web log" according to Rebecca Blood's essay "Weblogs: a history and perspective." Blog is used to refer to sites that can best be described as mini sites or mini directories, populated with the site owner's personal opinions. Blogs are now popular for business use as well.

As part of the explanation I also found an invitation to create my own blog and this challenge I could not resist. I have, as you can see, now created my own blog – it took me five minutes. I have given it an international title "Philately of Today" hoping to attract stamp collectors from all over the world, because its subject will be stamp collecting and philately.

Welcome again! Let’s find out, what we can create together in the fiels of philately using this new forum.

Collectors greetings


Svend