British Post Offices in Crete Forgeries

From StampWantsWiki

There were only five different stamps issued by the British post offices in and all have been heavily forged. This note looks at the design shared by the four lithographed stamps (not the first handstamped issue).

There are three main types of forgery:

1. Stamps with correct paper, perforation and colours (produced by the original printers)
2. Stamps similar to 1 but with different perforation and minor differences in colour and paper
3. Stamps with poor perforation and printing, usually on toned paper

In all cases the key test is whether the small circle above the central value is complete or not. In the genuine stamp it is complete although usually a bit distorted. The forgeries only show the top part of the circle.

The first image below a genuine 10 parades blue on the left along with two forgeries. The first forgery look reasonable until you examine the central circle. The second forgery stands out as wrong when seen beside the others.

genuine on left, other two are forgeries

central details of the first two on the left

Click on the images to see higher resolution.

The best reference for all Crete stamps is the standard Crete handbook:

• Rienk M. Feenstra and Friends, Crete: Postal History, Postage and Revenue Stamps, Coins and Bank Notes (collectio, Athens, 2001) ISBN 960-85275-6-2

An example of the difference indicated above is also shown in:

• Varro E. Tyler, Focus on Forgeries (Linn's Stamp News, 2000) ISBN 0-940403-88-9