KeVII Board Of Education? If So, Rare But Worthless

forgery, handstamped, not overprinted, wrong shape lettering,

Pagoda

For what it's worth, I don't like the way that last one looks either. My initial problem was with the "L". But we're back to my hand stamp question again. What is it that lets you know that it's a hand stamp?


And along with that question, here's the last Victoria:

another forgery, lettering is too thin,

re. handstamp against overprinting,

experience,

Pagoda

Okay, I guess experience will arrive for me eventually. :)

That's it for the QV officials. Only two to go. Here's the first KE:

another handstamp forgery,

lettering is wrong,

Pagoda

Wow.

Okay, last one (he's had a rough life...):

again, lettering is wrong,

Pagoda

Hunh. Clean sweep. Thanks for taking the time, Pagoda!

So does this problem apply to *all* overprints? I have many many hundreds, from all over the world, including lots of "Offices in..." GB stuff.

Polimon,

that's a good question and the answer is that every overprint is suspect especially those that raise the value substantially,

Pagoda

You can see genuine examples of Great Britain Officials here:
http://stampforgeries.com/forged-st...n-officials/

I have included some forgeries as well for comparison purposes.

Hi Classical Stamps, thank you for joining the conversation! I had used your site for visual reference and comparisons before I posted this initially, so I'm glad to hear from you. :)

The examples you have there are, in many cases, obvious to me. Others are not. To make things even more confusing for me, the letter 'A' in your first genuine example (5p BoE) looks crooked to me. And the example of the BoE in the Scott catalogue (my only reference btw) shows the entire BoE overprint slightly crooked.

Since I apparently cannot see something that is clear to some of you, I now have a fairly challenging problem on my hands. Given the size of this collection, there are lots of overprints. I need to learn how to identify them because I cannot possibly afford to have them all looked at by a professional.

This is all part of the learning process. It takes time, and looking at thousands of stamps. Luckily, you have time, no?

You can set these aside and come back to them from time to time, to see what bubbles to the surface. As long as you are not needing to market the collection quickly, it probably isn't critical to know the definitive answers right now.

I learn a few new things about stamps every day. Ain't it grand?

Cjd... thanks so much for that. You're quite right, I have time. That was a very timely reminder.

:) :)

I hesitate to add this, because your head may explode, but Scott has on occasion included illustrations that turned out to be forgeries.

I can hear the tut-tutting off in the distance (sound carries well over water), but Stanley Gibbons has let the odd forgery slip through, too.

With such an accumulation of (probable/possible) fake overprinted stamps you could assume that they might be "test" pieces? Most of your stamps are to some extent sub-standard... either in colors or cancellations etc so the possibility arises that they were test overprinted on lesser quality stamps.
I, perhaps alone in this, was quite impressed with the Board of Education overprint on the One Shilling stamp with only the impossible angle of overprint being completely wrong.
Check out fake/forgery sites for similar items and you may see that some might be comparable with or equal to some of Fournier's efforts.
Well worth keeping, researching and writing up in any philatelic context and could be worthy of a "Fakes/ Forgery" page in an album.