hdm1950
Member 
Posts: 1,886 
What I collect: I collect world wide up to 1965 with several specialty albums added due to volume of material I have acquired. At this point I am focused on Canada and British America. I am always on the lookout for stamps and covers with postmarks from communities in Queens County, Nova Scotia. I do list various goods including stamps occasionally on eBay as hdm50
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Post by hdm1950 on Mar 18, 2024 20:08:19 GMT
As I was working through an estate world wide album last week I found what I thought was a nice used Navigation and Commerce 1 franc from Mayotte mounted in with classics from France. Today I was looking at the few Indo China stamps and found another of the 1 franc. This set alarm bells off so I did a forgery check and now I am pretty sure both these stamps are Hirschburger forgeries. The country names are just too perfect. What surprised me was to see that many lower values were also forged. linkI will be keeping both but will note in the album that they are likely forgeries.  |
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greaden
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Posts: 402
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Post by greaden on Mar 18, 2024 20:21:40 GMT
Those are definitely forgeries of the Fourner/Hirschburger ilk.
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rod222
Member
Posts: 11,044
What I collect: Worldwide Stamps, Ephemera and Catalogues
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Post by rod222 on Mar 19, 2024 0:01:42 GMT
As I was working through an estate world wide album last week I found what I thought was a nice used Navigation and Commerce 1 franc from Mayotte mounted in with classics from France. Today I was looking at the few Indo China stamps and found another of the 1 franc. This set alarm bells off so I did a forgery check and now I am pretty sure both these stamps are Hirschburger forgeries. The country names are just too perfect. What surprised me was to see that many lower values were also forged. linkI will be keeping both but will note in the album that they are likely forgeries. Perhaps you can confirm forgeries by the background? Should be made up of mottled dots etc. Yours appear not to have them. Sc# 20 1f Navigation and Commerce.  |
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Post by gstamps on Mar 19, 2024 8:20:01 GMT
hdm1950, Since these stamps were only sold in the colonies, they were very difficult to procure at that time. Fournier created these reproductions (facsimiles) to help collectors fill in the blanks in their albums - I believe all the denominations in the series have been reproduced. They were successfully made so that they started to be resold as genuine ones. We recognize these reproductions very easily due to the different type of perforation: - perforation in line - the holes in the corners are not aligned with the horizontal and vertical ones. - 17 teeth vertically (not always - by breaking one of the corners there can be 16 like the original ones)  rod222, also appears in these reproductions background with dots. - some are very blurry, I guess because of the more fluid ink. There are 2 drawing elements that I check (if I have the stamp in front of my eyes): - the hand on the flag - doesn't have all the fingers - the small fruit - it is not round, flattened at the bottom. 
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Post by captphil on Oct 21, 2024 19:06:58 GMT
When you see the good and the bad side by side, they are easy to tell apart, and there are other signs than just those mentioned. The faces on the forgeries are not very animated. They seem cartoony. Also, the lettering along the tops of the real stamps is much sharper and cleanly cut. The engraved marks on the horn beneath the rim are nice and sharp. The oar with "Mouchon" at the bottom right is more narrow on the real stamps.
As a final note from me, these forgeries could be bought with fake overprints and fake postmarks, so never let those fool ya, either.
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Post by gstamps on Oct 22, 2024 8:22:51 GMT
captphil, you are absolutely right. For those interested, there is a paper about Fournier - unfortunately I can't find where I downloaded it from:  Stamps, cancellations and overprints are shown:  
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scub
Member
Posts: 199
What I collect: WW (without restrictions)
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Post by scub on Oct 22, 2024 9:06:25 GMT
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