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A Master of His Profession
There was a most interesting incident in France during the Second World War. French customs officers intercepted a suspicious mail item sent to Portugal in 1942. The contents were declared to be art reproductions of postage stamps. When these stamps were handed to some philatelic experts, they declared them to be genuine and the content of the parcel to be of extremely high value. Therefore, Jean de Sperati of Aix-les-Bains was put on trial for attempting to evade customs duties of 300,000 francs.
The trial became a sensation that nobody had expected. Sperati declared that the consignment did not contain genuine stamps but imitations prepared by himself. He called them ‘Philatelic Art’. When the court cited the expertise of well known philatelists, Sperati presented as evidence the material used for the production of his forgeries. He was a master indeed, an, in addition, he had given his work careful thought. He had managed to obtain remainders of the original paper on which the stamps had been printed long ago and he printed his forgeries on sheet margins and free spaces, or removed the original printing on the stamp and replaced it with his forgery. He thus overcame one of the great obstacles that usually defeat the common stamp forger – the original paper. He was also extremely careful in the production of his blocks, the selection of inks and the combinations of colours.
The perfection of de Sperati’s products is evident in this episode which took place in the court room during his trial. By mistake, some genuine stamps were mixed up with de Sperati’s forgeries. Not even the great philatelic experts could distinguish them. The court had to ask de Sperati himself to show which stamps were genuine and which were his reproduction.
De Sperati was acquitted as far as the infringement of customs regulations was concerned, but he was put on trial as a forger. He managed, though, to extricate himself again by declaring that he had never said that his products were genuine stamps. He had always called them reproductions! He later wrote a book about his ‘stamps’ which became a philatelic best seller and was soon out of print. The catalogue of his samples, which he promised to publish, was never edited. The British Philatelic Association bought a part of his products for ten million francs in 1954 and de Sperati gave his word never to put his imitations into circulation. Three years later, Jean de Sperati, master stamp forger died at Aix-les-Bains at the age of seventy three.
Most forgeries, and the most dangerous ones, are to be found in classical stamps. There are two reasons for this: first of all, it is with the rare and expensive stamps that the tedious and difficult work of the forger pays and secondly, they were printed by amore primitive technique, mostly by letter press and this makes them easier to imitate.
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