This exposé was translated from L’Echo de la
Timbrologie and published in the American Journal of Philately (New
York) for February 1905. It is interesting and relevant because it
points out that errors are not always rare or legitimately issued.
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The Truth about the Stamps of the Somali Coast with Inverted Centers
From
being very rare, the Somali Coast stamps with inverted centers have
become common, and let us see who will throw a stone at them; since the
law has busied itself with these stamps no one wishes to see or possess
them! Their too-rapid appearance was the despair of collectors and
certain among them talked of giving up collecting! In truth there has
been much talk about these stamps, everybody has seen thousands of them
and, finally, no one has them.
I think that it is right to inform amateurs what has been done and what these stamps are.
The
postage stamps of the French Colonies are sold in Paris, at the Agency
of the Colonies, 6 rue du Mont-Thabor. There a commission is charged
with receiving them, verifying them and destroying the defective ones
and the errors. Now, from the establishment of the Agency until 1904,
this commission amounted to nothing; the stamps often reached them at
two o’clock and the commission closed its session above five o’clock. It
is easily understood that all errors would escape their scrutiny, as
they could not verify 60,000 sheets in three hours.
It is thus that the following errors have appeared:
0.75 Indo China, inverted center
0.01 Martinique, name in blue
0.02 Congo, red, etc.
The dealers who obtained their supplies at the rue du Mont-Thabor
did not hesitate to ask M. Evrard, an employee, if he did not find
errors. He set himself to look for them and gave them out freely; I will
point out these:
0.05 Djibouti, green and yellow-green, inverted center
1fr Congo, inverted center
0.01 Congo inverted center
But M. Evrard at that time received practically nothing for his
trouble; he quickly ascertained that the said stamps were sold for 20
francs, indeed for 200 francs, apiece and, instead of giving up the
errors he put them aside and kept them.
In May 1903, M. Evrard proposed to me to sell me these inverted centers; he showed me what he had found up to that time:
1 sheet of 100 stamps of 0.04
2 sheets of 100 stamps of 0.20
15 sheets of 100 stamps of 0.25
3 sheets of 100 of 0.30
He asked me for my estimate and I replied to him that I estimated
the lot to be worth something like ten thousand francs. Upon his
proposition that I should take them at that price I agreed, then I sold
them, sometime after, to M. Dorsan Astruc.
But in proportion as the new deliveries were made at the rue du
Mont-Thabor, M. Evrard found new errors and below is the exact list of
all the values which came from the rue du Mont-Thabor:
|
Colored Center |
Black Center |
| 0.01 |
-- |
100 examples
|
| 0.04 |
100 examples |
-- |
| 0.05 |
700 |
1500 |
| 0.20 |
200 |
500 |
| 0.15 |
1900 |
200 |
| 0.30 |
-- |
300 (1st printing) |
| 0.50 |
-- |
600 |
| 0.75 |
-- |
500 |
| 1fr. |
-- |
24 |
All stamps really purchased at the rue du Mont-Thabor as
proved by the receipts presented by M. Evrard. (Since 1904 we see no
more errors coming from the rue du Mont-Thabor. This is because the
active members of the commission on verification are taking their duties
seriously, throwing out all errors from the deliveries as made to them
and carefully destroying them.)
In 1904 we have seen inverted centers of the Somali Coast come from
everywhere. Where do they come from? An inquiry has actually been
started. M. Le Poitevin being entrusted with the investigation.
An
order of arrest is issued against the principal culprit; a workingman
is already locked up! Because, if these stamps do not come from a theft,
properly speaking, they come from a clandestine printing executed at
night in the workrooms of the printer, which should be called a theft.
The values printed are the following:
With colored center 0.04; 0.40; 0.50; 1fr; 2fr and 5fr
With black center 0.40; 0.50; 2fr and 5fr
And more than all this, the following freaks have appeared:
1st. The frame of the 0.25 blue with the central mosque in blue
2nd. The 0.40 with black ground having the central design of a camel turned to the right instead of to the left.
I shall not take upon myself the role of the investigating
judge; I sincerely hope that these elusive and clandestine impressions,
which equally concern certain values with proper centers, certain values
of Madagascar and Congo, all good for postage, I sincerely hope, I say,
that this way of doing things will cease. The collectors are not the
only ones who suffer by it, but, what is worse, the budgets of our
Colonies also.
But I wish to show collectors that there is a difference between
these clandestinely printed stamps and the stamps coming from Evrard.
In the first place the values are not the same, excepting the 0.40 and 0.50.
Then the colors of these two stamps are not the same, notably the
rose, which is too bright, almost always the color of the frame runs and
the paper is tinted by it.
Finally the paper of the
clandestinely printed stamps is very much thicker, which is easily
recognized by the touch, but it becomes evident when one separates two
stamps. The Evrard stamps come apart evenly like all stamps coming from
the Colonial Agency; the stolen stamps are upon a paper which is almost
cardboard.
I will add that the paper of the two printings comes from the same
house, Blanchet & Kléber, and bears the same marks. The persons who
have executed these clandestine printings have, indeed, bought the paper
from the same house, but they did not take it of the same weight.
To sum up, and I am not alone in my opinion, the Evrard stamps are
good, recognized as having come from the rue du Mont-Thabor by the judge
charged with the investigation; they are worthy, according to this
decision, of figuring the catalogues and certain varieties are very
rare.
The stolen stamps are not worth much, and, a capital thing, it is
extremely easy to distinguish the two printings; one is a stamp, the
other is comparable to the fraudulently perforated essays upon
cardboard.
Dr.H. Voison
* * *
So this is the truth? Well, there is an old adage that
“murder will out” and its terse probity is certainly well illustrated
in this case!
To start with we are shown a commission, who were
appointed for the express purpose of doing certain things, whose members
are, or have been, so lax in performing the special duties entrusted to
them that one of the principal causes of its creation has been
completely nullified and rendered inoperative, for, as Dr. Voisin says,
it would be a physical impossibility for them to count, let alone
examine, twenty thousand sheets of stamps an hour, for this would mean
an average of a little over five and one-half sheets per second.
We are not told whether the errors which are said to be due to this
criminal carelessness made their appearance from the various colonies
for which the stamps were printed or directly from the Colonial Agency
in Paris, but we are strongly inclined to the belief that the errors in
question never saw the colonies whose names they bear. The pernicious
habit of selling any and all colonial stamps in Paris has many sins to
answer for and, though we freely admit that these stamps would have been
perfectly good for postage had they ever reached the colonies wherein
they were valid, we greatly doubt that they ever were used in that way,
although, so far as these three cases are concerned, there is, at least,
a possibility that some of them may have reached the colonies in
question.
We now come to the statement that “dealers who obtained their supplies
at the rue du Mont-Thabor did not hesitate to ask M. Evrard, an
employee, if he did not find errors,” etc. What, may we ask, is the name
which Frenchmen would apply to transactions of this kind? Here in the
United States the most lenient term which would be used would be bribery
on the part of the dealers in question, and malfeasance in office on
the part of M. Evrard. The fact that the latter gentleman found out
early in the game that he was not receiving his full share of the
profits accruing from the sale of his stolen goods is of no consequence
in considering the ethics of the case.
He was a government official whose special duty it was, after duly
verifying the account of the number of sheets of stamp delivered to the
Agency, to destroy all spoiled sheets and all errors of whatsoever kind.
Instead of doing this he carefully laid aside all errors which he found
and sold them at enhanced prices for his individual account.
The ingenuousness of Dr. Voisin’s description of his own part in the
disposition of the twenty-one sheets with inverted centers is so
apparent as to make its truth unquestionable. M. Evrard, having become
tired of acting as the cat’s paw for the more avaricious dealers who
first approached him, simply reversed things, himself played the part of
the monkey and induced the worthy doctor to become the cat whose paws
were to pull the chestnuts (francs, in this case) from the fire for his
delectation.
Finally we are given a list of 6,624 of these stamps with inverted
centers which came from the Colonial Agency but the doctor is silent as
whether or not he was the accomplice in marketing the extra 4,524 stamps
over and above the twenty-one sheets already spoken of. It is, however,
plain that none of these 6,624 stamps ever reached the Somali Coast;
therefore the case is of a very similar nature to that of our own
four-cent value of the series of 1901, which stamp has already been
expunged from our catalogue upon the ground that, although it was a
bona-fide error, it never was on sale at any post office.
Now, our conspirators are suddenly startled out of their tranquil
dreams of ever-increasing wealth and worldly prosperity by the
appearance upon the market of a flood of these self-same errors for
which they cannot account. Prices fall rapidly; their castles in Spain
totter upon their foundations; something must be done. Then an official
investigation is instituted, whether at the instance of the conspirators
themselves or through the fact of so many errors (?) being upon the
market reaching the ears of the officials we know not, but, at all,
events, the results are attained, for, we are told, “Since 1904 we see
no more errors coming from the rue du Mont-Thabor,” and that the
commissioners “are taking their duties seriously, throwing out all
errors from the deliveries as made to them and carefully destroying
them.” Thus is the source of supply closed to the arch conspirator, M.
Evrard.
We are then told that “an order of arrest is issued against the
principal culprit;” we are left in ignorance as to the name of this
unfortunate individual but, if justice has been done, we think that we
might safely hazard a guess that his name began with the fifth letter of
the alphabet. “A working man has been locked up!” Yes, probably upon
the principle of Justice which says that a man who steals a loaf of
bread for his starving family is a thief while the “man higher up” who
robs the government or some large institution of hundreds of thousands,
or millions, of dollars is an exponent of high financiering - a smart,
able man. But, of course, something had to be done and someone must be
made the scapegoat!
We must confess to being unable to understand certain fine
distinctions which are drawn by the worthy doctor. For instance, if the
“secret printing executed at night in the workrooms of the printer” is
theft, and we do not dispute this point for a moment, what shall we call
the method employed by Mr. Evrard in obtaining his stock of the same
stamps?
It is doubtless true that the secret printings can be easily
recognized from those emanating from the Colonial Agency, but we cannot
see how this fact improves the standing of the latter class. Neither
were ever really issued for use and if the Colonial budgets suffered by
reason of the secret printings they were most certainly not swollen to
plethoric proportions by the stolen, but regularly printed, stamps.
It is not until we reach the final paragraph of the doctor’s “True
story” that the real reason for its being is brought to light. In
speaking of the Colonial Agency stamps, he says: “the Evrard stamps are
good, recognized as having come from the rue du Mont-Thabor by the judge
charged with the investigation, they are worthy, according to this
decision, of figuring in the catalogues and certain varieties are very
rare. The stolen stamps are not worth much.”
Interesting and ingenious logic, is it not? My stamps, although
stolen and never issued are good! The other fellow’s, stolen also, are
no good. In other words: the fact that I bought stamps, knowing them to
be stolen and that they never were issued, is not reason why I should
not be protected and allowed to reap my expected profits from them,
because they were stolen by an official. But the poor workman, who
adopted what was probably the only way in which he could follow the
official’s lead, is to be imprisoned and not allowed to realize upon his
stamps.
So far as any opinion rendered by the investigating judge is
concerned, we fail to see how it can in any way affect the status of the
stamps in question. Of course he recognized that the stamps came from
the Colonial Agency; if he had before him one-half the evidence that is
presented in the paper under consideration, he could do nothing else.
That, however, is not the question; we freely admit that fact to be
true. The real point at issue so far as philatelists are concerned, is:
Were these stamps ever regularly issued through the post offices of the
Colony? To this we answer most emphatically: No.
This fact having been fully established there remains but one course
for cataloguers to pursue, and that is to completely ignore their
existence.
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