Mexico 1861 Forgeries + Genuine

I was researching forgeries of this series and there are many.. but haven't seen any like this. They look more like Benjamin Franklin than Miguel Costilla.
The Dos Reales, however, seems to check out.

Does anybody have any good links for referencing Mexican stamps of this series?

You might try this link: https://books.google.com/books?id=i...ge&q&f=false


Peter

Awesome Peter, you nailed it!
Can be found on pages 302-303. After all the pictures of forgeries I've looked at, none matched up to mine whereas the "R" in Reales is far away. Page 302 describes it perfectly!

It also looks like the 2 Reales is genuine according to page 303.
And I've fished out a Swiss auction that housed two entires with "Mexico" overprint, meaning Mexico City.
https://www.stampcircuit.com/catego...exico?page=5

Thank you for the help, Peter! Saved me a lot of time

You may also try to search at stampforgeries.com. There could be images of Mexico stamps similar to yours .

You can also download the Album Weeds PDF on Stamp Smarter
https://stampsmarter.org/learning/H...atalogs.html

And this online reference
http://stampforgeries.com/
Don

Done and done. Saved to the desktop!
You guys rock

You will also need the book ---THE YUCATAN AFFAIR about Raoul CH . de Thuin ,it has a large section on Mexico.

It's even more complicated than that. Album Weeds was written in 1882 so no forgery made after that will be covered. And there are indeed engraved forgeries made using the original plates. The Stampforgeries site doesn't give enough detail (yet?).

Just going by the basic stamp design is not enough. The reason why the unoverprinted remaindered stamps catalog so much is likely because so many were used up for forged control overprints with and without forged cancels. Also the 1/2 reales, 4 reales (both colors) and 8 reales were "unofficially reprinted" (i.e. forged) using the original plates with some retouching done, again with forged overprints and cancels added. The Yucatan Affair book will uncover a lot of the forgeries (and is a necessity for earlier Mexican issues) but there are many others as well.

Agreed, and is just one of the many good reasons we tell new hobbyists to always begin their identification processes with assumption that they do NOT have a rarity.
Don

Good stuff at MEPSI as well:

http://mail.mepsi.org/index.htm

There was a Regency stamp auction catalog issued 20 years ago ,the auction catalog had large full size pictures of most of the key Mexican stamps . It was more of a reference work than a catalog . Try to find it thru MEPSI well worth the effort to have a copy .

According to the pictures on stampforgeries and the MEPSI references, the stamp itself seems to be genuine. So the only thing to consider is the "MEXICO" overprint, which has many variations but seems to match a particular description: Thick first downstroke of "M" and second type measured at 13x2.5mm.

The MEPSI page (which is up to date) says that even the best forgeries can easily be noticed upon comparison, which is a nice "+" for this particular piece.

Thank you all for the incredible recources.

Don, that is great advice. It is much better to use descriptive references (as the ones given here) to look for even the smallest reasons as to why it *might not* be genuine, rather than trying to find the smallest reasons as to why it *must be* genuine.

It's a valuable tool in that it keeps us humble, and let's us enjoy the hobby without necessarily needing it for our contentment.