Sperati

There are occasions in the life of a collector when an object ceases, quite suddenly, to belong to him.

It may have belonged to a king, a widow, a bankrupt merchant, a missionary, a dead child, or a gentleman who died believing that he had understood its significance. But until that particular moment it has, nevertheless, been yours. You have purchased it, insured it, catalogued it, stored it in a little protective sleeve, shown it to friends who pretended to be interested, and perhaps, if you are a sufficiently serious collector, spoken about it with that dangerous pronoun which collectors use without embarrassment:

my.

I discovered the fragility of that pronoun one Thursday afternoon in London, before an audience at the Royal Philatelic Society London whom I had every reason to regard as the most delicate attendance before whom a man might possibly exhibit a Victorian postage stamp.

The object in question was a Great Britain 1880 2 shillings brown, Stanley Gibbons 121.

I had brought it in a proper mount.

I had rehearsed the lecture.

I had even polished my spectacles.

These details will become relevant.

The 2s brown is not a stamp one produces casually. It possesses the peculiar dignity of an object which has survived both history and the British Post Office. There are stamps which seem to have been born merely to convey a letter from one provincial aunt to another. The 2s brown belongs to a more aristocratic species. It has the air of having been entrusted with something important.

Mine was particularly attractive.

Or so I had believed.

It was a handsome example, beautifully cancelled, with that agreeable Victorian surface-printed appearance which makes one feel that the nineteenth century was not entirely wasted. I had acquired it some years previously from a dealer whose name, at this precise moment, I shall refrain from remembering.

This was not because I have forgotten it.

It was because I have suddenly remembered it too well.

I had been speaking for twenty-three minutes when the trouble began.

The subject of my lecture, the Great Britain 1880 two-shilling brown, Stanley Gibbons 121, is a stamp which requires very little introduction in a room full of serious philatelists but which nevertheless rewards the courtesy of being introduced properly.

I had put the stamp beneath the projector myself.

There it was, enlarged to the size of a small saucer upon the screen behind me: Queen Victoria's familiar profile, the rich brown surface printing, the large numeral of value, the letters in the lower corners, and the unmistakable architecture of a Victorian high-value stamp. Enlarged in that fashion, the design looked almost architectural. Every line seemed to have been placed there with a ruler.

"Notice," I was saying, "the quality of the impression. The 1880 two-shilling brown is not merely a scarce stamp. It is a particularly instructive example of the difficulties inherent in surface printing at this period."

I pointed to the image.

"The design is printed in brown from the engraved surface, and the impression has that characteristic combination of sharpness and slight irregularity which one expects from a genuine example. One must resist, incidentally, the temptation to judge these stamps solely by colour. The brown can vary considerably according to ink, paper, storage and exposure."

I clicked to the next image.

"This is where comparison becomes useful."

On the screen appeared two enlarged examples side by side.

"The stamp on the left is the example I have brought with me this afternoon. The example on the right has been kindly lent by the Institute especially for the occasion. Observe particularly the relationship between the lettering and the surrounding frame, and then look at the finer portions of the Queen's portrait."

I heard the small collective murmur which accompanies genuine philatelic attention: not excitement exactly, but concentration.

This was the sound I had hoped for.

I continued.

"The particular example I am showing you is interesting for another reason. Mine has an unusually clear cancellation. The cancellation is not merely decorative. It gives us another piece of evidence concerning the stamp's history."

I enlarged the cancellation.

"You can see how the bars cross the printed design. This is useful because the cancellation appears to belong naturally to the stamp rather than being an afterthought."

I remember saying those words.

An afterthought.

They would return to me later.

At the time, however, I was really pleased with myself.

I had prepared carefully.

The stamp had a good appearance. The colour was attractive. The impression was sharp. The perforations were convincing. The cancellation was clear enough to discuss. And, most importantly, I believed I knew what I was looking at.

I moved on to the question of rarity.

"The 1880 two-shilling brown is one of those stamps whose scarcity has encouraged both legitimate collecting and illegitimate ingenuity. The issue itself was not produced in enormous quantities, and genuinely fine examples, such as the one I am proud to own, are correspondingly desirable."

I smiled.

"But, you know, whenever a stamp becomes sufficiently desirable, someone eventually becomes sufficiently imaginative."

There was a little laughter.

I meant counterfeiters in general.

I did not yet appreciate the precision with which the remark had been directed at me.

I changed the slide and moved on to the peculiarities of the watermark.

"Now, the watermark is particularly useful here," I said. "The 1880 two-shilling brown belongs to the earlier surface-printed series in an interesting transitional period, and its paper bears the familiar spray of rose watermark. It is perforated 14, as one would expect from this series, but it is worth remembering that the appearance of the watermark is not merely a decorative curiosity. It forms part of the physical identity of the stamp."

I enlarged the watermark on the screen.

"You will notice, too, that this is not one of the large Crown-watermarked stamps which became characteristic of a number of the new values issued from 1880 onwards. The two-shilling brown rather preserves the older paper tradition. Indeed, the decision to retain the existing design was itself somewhat curious. By this date, large coloured corner letters had already been introduced for many surface-printed values, yet the 1880 two-shilling brown was produced with the older large white corner letters."

I paused over the enlarged image.

"That is one of the small historical peculiarities which makes this stamp rather more interesting than its catalogue entry might suggest. It looks, at first glance, like a straightforward Victorian high-value stamp. But when one begins to examine the paper, the watermark, the perforation, the lettering and the printing together, one discovers that it sits rather neatly at the junction between two periods of De La Rue's production."

I clicked to the next image.

"And this is precisely why the watermark matters. With a stamp of this rarity, we are not entitled to ask merely whether the design looks right. We must ask whether the paper is right, whether the watermark is right, whether the perforations are right, whether the printing is right, and whether all of these things belong together."

I smiled.

"In philately, as in theology, one should be suspicious of an argument which depends upon a single piece of evidence."

There was a little laughter.

I continued.

"The genuine stamp must be correct in its particulars and, more importantly, correct in their combination. A remarkably convincing design on the wrong paper is not a genuine stamp. Nor is the correct paper sufficient if the printing is wrong. What we are looking for is coherence."

I moved towards the next slide.

"And, fortunately, Victorian stamps are kind enough to leave us an extraordinary quantity of evidence."

At the time, I regarded that last observation as reassuring.

I would shortly discover that evidence can be a rather less obliging friend than one imagines.

At that moment, a gentleman in the third row raised his hand.

I stopped.

I have spent enough time in Anglican churches to know what a raised hand usually means. It can mean a question, an objection, a request for clarification, or—on particularly unfortunate occasions—the discovery of a theological difficulty which has survived four bishops and is now being presented to you personally.

"Yes?"

He stood.

He was a courteous man, which made matters worse.

"Forgive me," he said, "but have you ever had that particular example examined as a possible Sperati?"

There are questions which are questions.

And there are questions which, once spoken, rearrange the entire room.

This was the second kind.

There are sentences which enter the human mind slowly.

This was not one of them.

It entered immediately.

It sat down.

It took off its coat.

It ordered tea.

Sperati.

For approximately three seconds I became incapable of remembering what the word meant.

Then I remembered.

For a moment I simply looked at the guy.

Then I looked at the screen.

Then at my stamp.

Then the stamp looked at me.

Jean de Sperati.

The great conjuror of philately, and, by far, the most celebrated—a man who did not merely counterfeit stamps, but studied authenticity so profoundly that he could persuade paper, ink, watermark and cancellation to conspire in the telling of a beautiful lie.

Then, for reasons I still cannot explain, I looked back at the guy as though he might have been asking about somebody else's stamp.

"You mean my example?"

"Yes."

I laughed.

Not because anything was funny.

Because the human body occasionally chooses laughter when the brain has run out of alternatives.

"Well," I said, "I—yes. I mean, no. Not specifically."

A silence followed.

It was not an unfriendly silence.

That made it worse.

I turned towards the projected image again.

"Of course," I continued, "one must always consider Sperati when dealing with a stamp of this kind."

I heard myself saying it.

The irony was almost unbearable.

I had just spent more than twenty-three minutes explaining why the stamp was interesting.

I had spent perhaps five minutes explaining why it was genuine.

And I had never once considered that it might not be.

I picked up the actual stamp from the table.

It was mounted in a small protective holder.

I held it closer to the light.

I turned it over.

Then I turned it back again.

This was not part of the lecture.

Everyone knew it.

I knew it.

The stamp certainly knew it.

I looked at the cancellation.

An afterthought.

The words suddenly sounded rather different.

And then, while thirty or forty pairs of extremely knowledgeable eyes waited politely for me to say something intelligent, I made the mistake which began, perhaps, the most embarrassing philatelic episode of my life.

I started trying to remember exactly where I had bought it.

I do not wish to attribute consciousness to postage, particularly before the RPSL, but I shall say that I have received more sympathetic expressions from women at funerals than I received from that little brown rectangle.

"Indeed," I said.

It was the only word available.

"Indeed."

I then made my first mistake.

I picked up the stamp.

This was unnecessary. Everyone in the room knew what it was.

I examined it more closely, as though de Sperati might have written a confession on the back.

"No," I said.

Then, after a pause:

"I mean—yes."

There was a small movement in the audience.

I had contradicted myself before completing a sentence.

I attempted to recover.

"I mean that, naturally, the possibility should be considered."

I turned the stamp over.

There is a particular kind of silence produced when a lecturer who has been speaking confidently for over thirty minutes suddenly begins inspecting his own evidence.

I knew, at once, that I had made another mistake.

The stamp was not merely an object I was exhibiting.

It was now an object I was defending.

And defence, I have discovered, is dangerous when one's knowledge is still attempting to catch up with one's anxiety.

I began to reconstruct its history.

"I acquired this from—"

I stopped.

The dealer.

I remembered the dealer.

I remembered the shop.

I remembered the afternoon.

I remembered, with increasing horror, that I had bought the stamp because the dealer had told me that it was "a very nice example."

That phrase, which had previously sounded reassuring, now appeared to me as one of the great masterpieces of commercial ambiguity.

A very nice example.

Of what?

I continued.

"I acquired it some years ago from a reputable source."

This was true.

Unfortunately, "reputable" is not synonymous with "infallible".

Nor is "source" synonymous with "saint".

I could feel the room becoming interested in something other than my lecture.

I tried to continue with the subject of the afternoon.

The plate.

The printing.

The issue.

The scarcity.

The usual respectable architecture of philatelic discourse.

But my mind had deserted the lecture.

It was now in my study at home.

It was opening drawers.

It was examining correspondence.

It was looking through invoices.

It was asking questions of a man who had not been expecting to be interrogated.

Where did you get it?

When?

From whom?

Did you examine it properly?

Did you have it expertised?

And, most humiliatingly:

Why on earth did you not?

Were you presenting it today as a genuine stamp with the intention of selling it as such?

Good heavens! No! Certainly not!

I found myself saying:

"I believe I purchased it in the early—"

I stopped.

"Late."

Another pause.

"Actually, I think it was the middle."

I heard someone cough.

I have always considered coughing a useful instrument of social communication. In this instance it sounded remarkably like laughter attempting to disguise itself as bronchial distress.

I decided to proceed.

"I acquired it during a period when I was particularly interested in Victorian surface printing."

This was perfectly respectable.

It was also completely irrelevant.

I could hear my own voice becoming more rapid.

Timothy Monday, I thought, slow down.

I did not.

I began speaking about the watermark.

Then the perforations.

Then the cancellation.

Then Sperati.

Then the cancellation again.

Then something about Cumbria.

I have no idea why.

At some point I said that I had always found the Victorian Post Office "a rather more trustworthy institution than the modern world."

This produced laughter.

I had not intended it as a joke.

I wished immediately that I had.

The gentleman who had raised the question remained standing.

He was still very courteous.

That was becoming unbearable.

"Have you compared the lettering?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Against a known genuine example?"

"Yes."

I had not.

I had compared it mentally.

Only mentally.

There is a great difference.

He mentioned a detail.

I looked.

Another gentleman mentioned another.

I looked again.

Someone referred to the characteristics of de Sperati's work.

Jean de Sperati's skill was not confined to copying the appearance of a stamp. He could begin with genuine old stamp paper, chemically remove the original design while preserving such inconveniently authentic features as the paper, watermark, perforations and even an existing postmark, and then introduce his own photographic reproduction upon the surviving material. The Royal Philatelic Society London described his particular mastery as lying in the extraordinarily accurate replication of colour and in the minute retouching of photographic images, sometimes making his productions exceedingly difficult to detect.

And precisely, one of the most astonishing examples of his mastery is his work on the Great Britain 1880 2s brown. Sperati did not simply produce a crude imitation of the design: he developed a specialised photo-lithographic process for reproducing the stamp.

There is, I believe, a certain romantic justice in the story that de Sperati began his career after discovering that a precious French colonial stamp he had saved to buy was itself a forgery. He resolved, so the story goes, to take his revenge upon the experts by becoming the forger they would one day be unable to detect. If the story is not entirely true, it is at least magnificently characteristic.

That, I think, is what makes de Sperati so extraordinary. The mediocre forger copies a stamp; de Sperati studied the anatomy of authenticity itself. He understood that a convincing forgery must not merely look genuine: its paper, colour, printing, watermark, perforations and postal history must appear to belong to the same historical object. In that sense, he was less a counterfeit printer than a rather sinister archaeologist of the postage stamp.

I looked at my stamp again.

Then came the moment when the various little inconveniences began to accumulate.

One can forgive a suspicious feature.

Two may be unfortunate.

Three become a pattern.

Four begin to resemble Providence.

I suddenly understood that the stamp was not merely possibly a Sperati.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to explain why it was not.

I remember feeling extraordinarily hot.

This is inconvenient when one is wearing a dark suit.

I removed my spectacles.

I cleaned them.

I put them back on.

The stamp remained.

Like an ostrich, I briefly entertained the childish hope that, perhaps, if I could no longer see it properly, the problem might somehow cease to exist.

It had not.

I thought of the audience.

The Royal Philatelic Society London.

Men and women who had spent lifetimes examining paper, ink, perforations, cancellations, plates, shades and varieties with an attention which would embarrass a forensic pathologist.

And there I stood, with a potentially forged 2s brown in my hand, having spent the first thirty minutes telling them what a fine example it was.

I felt something very close to shame.

Not because it might be a forgery.

Because I might have been fooled.

There is a difference.

Collectors are accustomed to rarity.

We are less accustomed to humiliation.

The first can be placed in a catalogue.

The second cannot.

I looked once more at the stamp.

And then, rather unexpectedly, I became calm.

It was not a genuine 1880 2s brown.

Very well.

Suppose it was not.

What was it?

A lie?

That seemed too easy.

A fraud?

Historically, yes.

But materially?

No.

It was an extraordinary piece of human work.

And there, I confess, my lecture underwent a conversion of almost theological proportions.

The genuine stamp had slipped quietly out of the pulpit, and the forgery had taken its place at the lectern.

What I had prepared to say was abandoned somewhere between the watermark and my growing embarrassment, and what emerged instead was a rather more dangerous subject: whether the counterfeit might, in certain circumstances, prove more intellectually magnificent than the thing it had so audaciously pretended to be.

I put down my notes.

"I had intended," I said, "to speak to you this afternoon about the genuine stamp."

There was a little laughter.

"I find that I may have to speak about something rather more interesting."

I spoke to the 2s brown.

"A forgery."

And I began again.

We have a peculiar prejudice in favour of the legitimate.

We admire the genuine object because it has passed, as it were, the examination of existence. It was made by the proper hand, at the proper time, for the proper purpose. It possesses provenance. It possesses pedigree. It has the blessing of authenticity.

And authenticity is certainly valuable.

I do not wish to suggest otherwise.

But we sometimes confuse authenticity with merit.

They are not the same thing.

A genuine postage stamp may be extraordinarily beautiful. It may be rare. It may have been printed under fascinating historical circumstances. It may have travelled through the world in the corner of a letter which carried news of a birth, a death, a marriage, a war, a bankruptcy or a declaration of love.

But the fact that it is genuine does not mean that its existence required genius.

It was commissioned.

It was manufactured.

It was distributed.

It entered the machinery of ordinary life.

The legitimate object enjoys the enormous privilege of being expected to exist.

The forgery does not.

The forger must persuade the world that something exists which does not.

That is a very different intellectual problem.

Consider what is required.

Observation.

Memory.

Patience.

Technical knowledge.

Material knowledge.

Imitation.

Restraint.

Determination.

And, above all, an extraordinary understanding of the thing being imitated.

The forger must know his victim.

Indeed, he may have to know it rather better than a husband knows his wife—which is perhaps why so many forgers succeed where perfectly respectable marriages fail.

The forger must know what makes the genuine object itself.

He must understand its structure sufficiently well to reproduce its appearance without possessing its history.

This is why I have gradually become suspicious of the word mere when applied to a forgery.

A mere forgery.

There is nothing mere about it.

A bad forgery is merely bad.

But a great forgery is a peculiar kind of intellectual achievement: the attempt to manufacture authenticity by understanding authenticity more deeply than the ordinary observer does.

That does not make the deception morally right.

Let us not become sentimental.

Forgery can ruin collections. It can deceive honest people. It can transfer considerable sums of money from one pocket to another under false pretences. And, in particularly unfortunate circumstances, it can even cast a certain doubt upon a gentleman's qualifications for continued membership of the Royal Philatelic Society London—which, I assure you, is a considerably more alarming prospect than the loss of a few pounds.

But moral condemnation does not exhaust aesthetic or intellectual judgment.

A man may do something wrong and do it magnificently.

History is full of such men.

And here, perhaps, is the uncomfortable question.

What if the counterfeit requires more genius than the original?

What if the imitation demands more patience than the thing imitated?

What if the spare, the substitute, the rejected, the illegitimate object possesses qualities which the legitimate object was never required to develop?

We tend to praise the original because it won the competition merely by being itself.

The forgery must enter the competition disguised as somebody else.

It must survive inspection.

It must endure suspicion.

It must imitate not merely appearance but expectation.

And sometimes it succeeds.

Sometimes it succeeds so beautifully that generations of experts are required to expose it.

I looked down at my unfortunate 2s brown.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I said, "I appear to have brought you an object which is rather more interesting than the one advertised."

There was laughter.

This time I joined it.

I told them the truth as far as I knew it.

I explained where I had acquired the stamp.

I admitted what I had failed to examine.

I described the accumulating evidence.

And then I said something which I had not intended to say when I woke that morning.

"I am rather fond of it."

That produced silence.

"I realise," I continued, "that this is an extraordinary thing for a philatelist to confess in public."

I looked again at the little brown rectangle.

"But consider the alternative. If it is genuine, I possess a fine Victorian stamp. If it is Sperati, I possess evidence of an extraordinary technical intelligence, a history of deception, an episode in the history of philately, and a permanent reminder that I ought to have been more careful."

I paused.

"In either case, I possess something worth studying."

That afternoon, I learned something which no catalogue had ever taught me.

The legitimate object is not always the summit of human achievement.

Sometimes it is the beginning.

Sometimes the imitation, precisely because it has been forced to climb further, reveals more about human ingenuity than the original.

A genuine rose grows.

A forged rose must be constructed.

A genuine signature is written.

A forged signature must be studied.

A genuine love may begin almost accidentally, as all the best loves do.

A counterfeit love must be performed.

And here, perhaps, lies the melancholy heart of the matter.

The genuine thing is allowed to be imperfect.

The forged thing must constantly defend its perfection.

Love, for example, can grow slowly, foolishly, unevenly. Two people can stumble into it without possessing any particular technical competence whatsoever. They may quarrel, misunderstand one another, forgive one another, forget anniversaries, remember peculiar details, grow old and eventually discover that something real has happened between them.

No one has to authenticate it.

But counterfeit love is different.

It requires performance.

Attention.

Memory.

Precision.

It must imitate tenderness without possessing tenderness.

It must manufacture the appearance of devotion while concealing its absence.

And yet, perversely, there are moments when the effort involved in the imitation tells us something profound about the thing itself.

The counterfeit teaches us what the genuine requires.

Perhaps that is why I could not bring myself to despise my unfortunate stamp.

I had begun the afternoon wanting to demonstrate its legitimacy.

I ended by being interested in its illegitimacy.

It had betrayed me, certainly.

But it had also taught me something.

And I have always thought that education is a rather elegant form of betrayal.

When the lecture finally ended, several people came to speak with me.

They were extraordinarily kind.

Philatelists, like Anglicans, are sometimes at their most charitable when a man has publicly discovered that he is wrong.

Someone mentioned de Sperati again.

Someone else wanted to see the stamp.

One gentleman said, with admirable understatement, that it was "an interesting example."

I have since learned to fear those words.

Interesting example.

It may mean anything.

It may mean treasure.

It may mean disaster.

It may mean that the object before you has ceased to be what you thought it was and has become something considerably more complicated.

Having driven the more than three hundred miles separating London from Cumbria, I returned home that very night, and placed the stamp carefully upon my desk.

I did not put it immediately into the box where I keep my more respectable specimens.

I left it outside.

There it remained, beneath the lamp, looking rather pleased with itself—as well it might, after so long a journey.

I poured myself a cup of tea.

Then I looked at the stamp again.

"You caused me considerable embarrassment," I told it.

It offered no apology.

I rather respected that.

And so I kept it.

Not as the Great Britain 1880 2s brown I had once believed it to be.

But as something else.

A lesson.

A deception.

A work of extraordinary patience.

A small monument to human ingenuity.

And perhaps, in its own peculiar way, a warning against the collector's most dangerous temptation: the belief that the genuine is always more interesting than the thing which had to work extraordinarily hard to pretend to be genuine.

I still collect the real thing.

Naturally.

One must retain some standards.

But I no longer laugh quite so readily at the counterfeit.

Sometimes the forged thing has suffered more to become beautiful.

And sometimes, if one is very lucky—or very unlucky—it teaches one more than the original ever could.