"NICARAGUAN STAMP.--Will be ready in a week. A beautiful proof of the Nicaraguan Stamp (equal to the original) will be sent for 13 postage-stamps. Only 75 proofs of this will be taken; each proof will be numbered, and then the block burnt. An early application is really necessary, 25 copies being already sold. Address...."
These "proofs," rarer, no doubt, than the originals, were endorsed editorially, and collectors unable to procure the original stamp were told they "would do well to provide themselves with one of these facsimiles." The astute Mr. Pemberton, however, took a very different view. "Although he tells every one that they are merely facsimiles and not the real stamps, we cannot but help thinking that he is acting wrongly; for less scrupulous dealers than himself will sell them as genuine.... Again, these imitations are by far the best executed of any we have seen. The regularly forged stamps are wretched in comparison with these, and therefore all the more caution will be required to detect them." So he proceeds to a detailed description of the small differences existing between genuine and imitation.
There is no royal road by which the collector can attain to the accurate and ready discrimination between the right and the wrong copies of stamps. Forgeries have multiplied enormously between 1863 and 1911, so that now the standard handbook by the Rev. R. B. Earée is a masterpiece of detail entitled "Album Weeds," occupying two large volumes containing nearly 1,300 pages of text. It would be idle to pretend that even the expert has every description contained therein "at his fingers' ends." Yet the expert is rarely deceived in a stamp, even when he has not access at the time to Mr. Earée's work or other references. I remember an early instruction, the only one that covers the subject, but I forget whence it comes. It was that if you study your stamps an imperceptible sense will come to you that will enable you at once to acclaim the true and to suspect if not denounce the false.
Beyond this I can only advise the reader that, as a complete novice, he would be unwise to purchase costly rarities and valuable stamps from unknown and irresponsible persons. The novice will remain a novice in these matters, unless he acquires some knowledge of the differences (generally readily distinguishable) between a stamp that is from an engraved plate and a forgery that is, say, lithographed or from a wood-cut. It is important to remember also--at least for the new collector--that strange though it may seem to him, stamps really do fetch what they are considered to be worth by collectors and dealers of experience, and that if rare stamps are offered much below the current quotation by individuals supposed to know their true worth, it may often be, and generally is, that the wares they have for sale are either forgeries or carefully mended copies of damaged originals.