S of course is for Spiro Sperati and Spud papers. The Spiro brothers produced hundreds of different forgeries. The Spud Papers were a series of articles, complete with actual examples of the forgeries, published in The Philatelist
Here are quotes from the compiled reprint by Ragatz:
Appalled at the demoralization confronting the hobby through the wholesale production of counterfeits on all hands, Smith and Atlee in 1871 launched an heroic counter-attack by beginning publication of The Spud Papers in Volume Five of The Philatelist. Both considered forgeries "noxious growths to be eradicated from the collector's gar-den," and the series gained its name from the spud, a long-handled instrument with a steel blade at the bottom end, employed by gardeners in cutting off weeds by their roots. Meticulous descriptions of forgeries were given but, to simplify matters for collectors, actual specimens were used to illustrate each article as was done with sample crests and colored cut-outs mounted in Smith's hobby catalogs and with genuine low-face stamps given readers of The Stamp Collector's Magazine from 1863 to I 874 as well as in early issues of
The Philatelist.
Twenty Spuds, in Volumes Five and Six, were written by Atlee, and he set the form for the entire series —a description of the forgery and then of the genuine stamp, with a copy of the actual forgery to illustrate. Number 21 bears no author's name. Pemberton wrote Numbers 22 through 25 as a stopgap and Earee (no accent until Number 41) then took over, reversing Atlee's procedure by describing the genuine stamp first, and continued the series through Number 63 in the December, 1876, issue of The Philatelist, the last one published. Papers 1 through 11 appear in Volume Five (1871), Papers 12 through 21 in Volume Six (1872), Papers 22 through 31 in Volume Seven (1873), Papers 32 through 42 in Volume Eight (1874), Papers 43 through 53 in Volume Nine (1875) and Papers 54 through 63 in Volume Ten (1876). Three more unnumbered Spuds, known to collectors as Numbers 64, 65 and 66, appeared in Issues 9 (January-March, 1879), 10 (April-June, 1879), and 11 (July-September, 1879) of a later Smith publication, The Philatelic Quarterly, and the final one, known as Number 67, in Smith's Stamp Collector's Annual for 1881.
There were, thus, sixty-seven Spud Papers in all and, today they constitute one of the most highly-cherished items in the reference material field. None arc readily pro-curable at this late date because, while files of The Philatelist are by no means uncommon, most subscribers appear to have removed the forgeries from their magazines as received, ironically enough mounting them in their albums, and most copies of the magazine encountered today have been stripped. The Philatelic Quarterly and the 1881 Annual are themselves rare, and unstripped ones are almost non-existent. Especially scarce are Spuds Numbers 43-53, which appeared in Volume Nine of The Philatelist, the "tough" one in the set, and Numbers 64-67, appearing in the two later publications. U. S. 10c I 847's are common by comparison, and even with a limited market, some of these later ones have brought as much as $25 each. The chief source of sup-ply for Spud, has been the volumes of odd numbers of The Philatelist bound together as Papers for Philatelists, which contain varying numbers of Spuds each, and which appear not to have sold very well, for most literature dealers have had supplies of new copies in their stocks until recent times. None of them, however, contain Spuds Numbers 64-67.
It appears after rather careful check that there are but twelve complete collections of Spud Papers hi existence today, all built slowly through the years, one number here and another there. Because of strip-ping, one Manchester collector found it necessary to purchase eleven sets of The Philatelist before completing Spuds Numbers 1 through 63. Neither the Royal Philatelic Society, London, nor the Collectors Club of New York has a complete set as, typically enough, certain copies of their magazines which originally contained the forgeries have been stripped in both cases.
The Spiros were naturally out-raged at the whole proceeding and refused further to supply Smith, but he experienced no difficulty in securing sufficient copies of the desired counterfeits for his purpose through a dummy. As collectors became aware of the forgeries menace, they developed a more critical attitude in their purchases and, by the late 1870's British and American dealers in general were boycotting both phantasies and forgeries. In the 1880's the movement spread to the more easy-going continent. For this reform, the Spud Papers were primarily responsible and the Spiros, finding that line of their business declining, abandoned the manufacture of facsimiles after some fifteen years of lucrative production.
Because of the constant appearance of these early forgeries, and especially the Spiro products, in collections reaching the market today, it has been deemed desirable to compile an index to the Spud Papers, appending Scott's type and catalog numbers for the stamps, Noske's Weltganzschenkatalog numbers for foreign envelopes and Hurt-Williams type and catalog numbers for the locals, indicating where in the several Smith and Trivet publications the original and pirated descriptive articles and, in the case of the Smith journals, copies of the forgeries themselves may be found for checking purposes.
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on Jan-07-07
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on Jan-07-07
at 22:43:25 PST
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on Jan-07-07
at 10:40:06 PST
