Album Weeds Editions

As I've been going through some recent lots from ebay I've run across a couple groups of stamps that are likely forgeries or reprints. One group consists of ten items covering Buenos Aires 1 - 8; the others are Argentina 5 - 7.

I found these in mixed lots of packets with the average cost per packet of less than $0.04.

I'd like to ask the more experienced members a couple questions. When you suspect a stamp in your collection to be a fake, what steps do you take in order to confirm the item is indeed fake. What resources do you use in your research?

Thanks in advance.

Dale

Album Weeds, and it is available on Stamp Smarter

Peter

Dale ---The first rule to follow in stamp collecting is that anything you buy has already been seen and checked out by five dealers/collectors before you ever seen them . It is rare that you will ever buy any stamps that I and other collectors/dealers have already checked out .

All those huge estate collections that are sold at the major stamp auctions are most likely already checked out by the firms staff . Sure sometimes something slips thru but by the time you see the stamps it has already gone thru three to five hands .

There is nobody with the experience to catch everything ,there are areas that have very little interest and can pass thru experts because they don't understand it .

Trust me if you think you found something ,bring it here and someone can answer your question or expand your knowledge or direct you to a answer .

Peter,

I wasn't aware StampSmarter had a copy of Album Weeds. I really shouls spend more time there.

Dale

floortrader,

I will try to upload some scans tomorrow. It will give me a chance to try out the scanner on my all in one print.

I have seen a number of threads discussed recently that dealt with the subject of forgeries and figured it was time to stretch myself a bit and move in the direction of flyspecking.

Dale

Those forgeries are very commonly found and pretty easy to identify. Unless a previous owner has trimmed them, the Buenos Aires will have too wide of a margin on one or more sides. The genuine will almost never have a margin. Note on this one that you can just see the edge of the next stamp at top left.

The others are also easy to detect, they all have the narrow 'C' in Centavos which was never done with the 10c and 15c values. The 5c did, but the forgeries almost never have the right color or paper. Once you have seen a few you'll be able to pick them out of a lineup easily. Here's a genuine narrow C 5c:

And finally here is an example of the Lange forgeries:

All is built on acquired reference books and articles plus websites. Like any research project, you use anything and everything you can find. Sometimes, there is nothing currently available. Descriptive works like Album Weeds can be limiting; photos make much better references. Album Weeds also only involves classic stamps and a fair number of those require plating to identify them as being genuine. Even then, excellent forgeries made by photographic reproduction may exist. The best general references for US Washington-Franklin issues are also largely text and are hard to understand for many collectors.

It is highly preferred to identify based on a known/certified/signed genuine than trying to sort through an incomplete list of forgery characteristics. Mushroom collectors who like to stay alive learn the exact characteristics of what they are hunting; anything else that does not match exactly is rejected. So it is for stamps; examine and learn the genuine and compare what you have to it. There are plenty of reference photos from auctions, ebay, websites and online in general that can be collected for personal use. Scott catalog pictures still include reprints and forgeries and should not be relied upon.

There is comparatively less material available on forged perfs, repairs and forged postal markings and cancels. That probably requires a lot more hands-on experience.

The genuine 5c also has wide margins, please tell me more about the margins in the real vs forged ones and thank you.

The small margins are on the Barquitos (little ship) stamps of Buenos Aires, not the Escudito (little shield) stamps of Argentina. If you look at the Barquito stamp I posted, Scott #2, you can see just how thin the spacing was between stamps on the sheet. With the common forgeries the spacing is much wider and it's unusual to find them trimmed enough to pass as genuine. The Escudito stamps had fairly large distances between stamps so the margins are often pretty wide.

I see the term "album weeds" being used in this thread as a term to describe fakes and forgeries. Is this term also used to describe high catalog items found with unexpected condition issues?

Album Weeds are a set of 8 books ----here is my set .

Here are scans of the early Argentina issues that I suspect are forgeries.






It's my first time using this scanner, and a long time since I last scanned anything. Apologies for the less than stellar image quality.

Dale

From my collection .

Dale, yes all three of those are the Lange forgeries. Very common and easily found in lots of collections. Officially they were all printed by Lange in the 1870s but there are so many of them that I feel fairly confident saying they were reprinted many times after his initial run.

Mine are at https://billsey.seymourfamily.com, frame 1 page 7 for the genuine Escuditos.

floortrader,

Thanks for sharing the page. There certainly seem to be a number of variations of the forged varieties. Mine all have 11 lines and 72 dots. At some point I'll look at making a page for them.

As I've been slowly going through the lots I recently bought I've been setting aside some of the unusual items. In addition to the forgeries I've run across some cinderellas, a packet of airmail etiquettes, and some Lundy and Sanda Island issues. All will eventually find a home in my collection.

Dale

billsey,

Thanks for the info and the link. It's always fun to browse others' collections online.

Dale