Hirschberger forgeries

The fairly common but fairly high-quality forgeries of type Groupe (Navigation and Commerce) stamps of the French colonies were produced by Charles Hirschberger. He took over the business of forger François Fournier, who is often miscredited for these forgeries. Since examples of the type Groupe forgeries appear in the Fournier forgeries albums made from material that was acquired by buying out Hirschberger, it is a natural mistake.

Full mint sets are known of all the forgeries which cover all the issuing colonies, but forgeries are often found as singles in collections.

The characteristics of the forgeries is as follows:
 * The perfs measure differently, 13½x14 istead of the genuine 14x13½.
 * The key point is the upper hand on the flagpole of the left figure is clubby, showing only one dividing line in the fingers at best. Genuine show all dividing lines for the fingers.
 * An additional check is the central fruit in the cornucopia at upper right is a blob. In the genuine, that fruit has prominent creases in the bottom and is a different shape.
 * The background of little dots is unevenly shaded, but this can happen with overinked genuine stamps.

While the above genuine stamp shows much finer detail than the forgery, there are better-printed Hirschbergers, plus inking problems can make some genuine stamps quite rough, too.

Hirschbergers of this design are nearly all found mint, with and without gum. The gum is smooth and semi-matte and appears to have held up better than the genuine gum which is often crackly. Hirschberger colors are different from the genuine and are distinctive once you've seen a number of them. There are shades of the forgeries, too.

 File:Pak hoi hirschberger.jpg|Clearly with all the Hirschberger forgery characteristics, it is perhaps useful to note that the overprint is printed better than on most of the genuine stamps. 

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