There is little danger of the collector being much at the mercy of the forger if his transactions are confined to the reputable dealers, for these latter have done more to purify the honest trade in stamps than can, I think, be said of the dealers in the objects of other forms of collecting. They have expert knowledge on their staff, and access to highly specialised opinions and advice in the various branches of the subject.
Personally, I do not consider the forgery question nearly so serious an obstacle in Philately as in other crafts. Most active stamp-collectors are companionable with other students of the same subject, and there would be little opportunity for an _Affaire Vrain-Lucas_, in which during a period of several years a French autograph collector accumulated 27,000 autographs for about £6,000, mostly forgeries, and all from the same source, or for such a string of incidents as was exposed in the recent china case in Great Britain.
Forgeries of stamps are made either for the purpose of defrauding the Government or else for rifling the pockets of the stamp collector; these may be classed in two groups: (1) where a stamp is a forgery either in its entirety or in some added, as distinguished from "altered," material detail; and (2) where a genuine stamp is so altered as to apparently convert it into some other stamp. The first group are generally covered in the term "forgeries," the second being specially distinguished as "fakes." There is another class dubbed "bogus," or sometimes more elegantly _timbres de fantasie_, which comprises labels which are a pure invention, and never had any genuine existence at all.
[Illustration: THE FAMOUS "STOCK EXCHANGE" FORGERY OF THE ONE SHILLING GREEN STAMP OF GREAT BRITAIN.
One specimen was used on October 31, 1872, and the other on June 13 of the next year. The enlargements betray trifling differences, in the details of the design as compared with the genuine stamp above.]
The first attack on the Post Office revenue of which there is any record is the subject of a letter from Downing Street, London, dated September 2, 1840, and addressed to the late Sir (then Mr.) Rowland Hill:--"Mr. Smith has just called and informed me that a forgery of the Penny Label was yesterday detected in his office. The letter bearing the forged stamp has been handed over to the Stamp Office to be dealt with by them ... the forged stamp is a wood-cut...." An entry a few days later in Mr. Hill's diary reads:--"At the Stamp Office I saw the forged label. It is a miserable thing and could not possibly deceive any except the most stupid and ignorant."