French Congo 1st Issues Possible Forgeries

Just mounted these for my forgery collection . The problem is the previous owner was not sure they are forgeries and trying to find information was unsuccessful .The catalogs were no help because they don't have satisfactory reference points .

Some quotes from The Serrane Guide, published by the APS in 1998; original publication in 1927, 29: notes numerous varieties of #s 1-7, making specialization indispensable. Works of Marconnet (1897, pp. 263-68) and de Vinck (1928, pp. 61-62) give amateurs enough information on the various types and their measurements. Numerous forged overprints, varieties included.........Geneva, three types of figure 5. #s 8-11: same comment as above. CONGO FRANCAIS must be 18 1/2 mm. long. Hope this helps a little.

Floortrader, this one has a recent Sismondo certificate:



Hope it helps.

Thanks for the additional information ,they will stay in my forgery collection .

Floortrader I don't see well, but few of your stamps seems to miss the cédille (cedilla) under the ç

I don't know about this overprint but in French it's "Congo français" , no capital on the F, same with Congo belge , we don't use capital for the language; English = anglais ,

Thanks area66 ,but as CLASSIC's photo shows they did capitalize the "F" in Francais

Floortrader, nice stamps. A quick look on ebay shows several similar stamps with the lowercase "f". Whether they are genuine, I gave no idea.

floortrader,

I think it is neat how you spot these details in your stamps. As a WW collector who basically collects "one of each" I actually find this quite interesting and certainly adds another dimension to one's collection. I suspect this is usually the domain of the specialist collector rather than a WW generalist collector, but then again, there are no rules to stamp collecting!

I guess you just need to be observant and/or buy a bunch of the same stamps and start looking at them carefully. However, I find it hard to see these kinds of details unless someone else has pointed them out previously.

Thanks Chris .......I have always called myself a worldwide collector but I expanded and increased my collection with lots of specialize material . By calling myself a W.W. collector it gives me the freedom to go in a lot of different directions .

Just a note to everybody . Two days ago Francois Feldman a Stamp Auction firm in Europe just listed their Dec 10,2015 auction for French Colonies . They listed a bunch of French Congo ,very few of their early overprints look like the copy of the Sismondo copy that Classic posted . So I am thinking there are a lot of variety in the overprints ,the cancels may help to identify the real ones better . I will be looking for better reference sources on them .