A purchase in 1882 of twenty £1 "Anchor" would not lower the market if now offered for sale, but £500 worth would probably result in a slump.
However, it is generally a case of _Hinc illæ lacrymæ_, for the would-be traveller on the royal road to ease and great wealth has either never invested at all or has selected stamps which show a marked depreciation as the years roll on--_e.g._, the Fourpence Halfpenny of Great Britain, which was going to rise abnormally, but which has been "unloaded" at, or even under, "face." Only a trifling instance, but it serves to show the risks of investment in stamps when current or just obsolete; it is safer to buy those which have during a period of some years shown an inclination to rise steadily--but then investors and speculators are generally impatient and won't wait.
During the late South African War, there was an excessive speculation by the uninitiated among the soldiers and the populace in the provisional stamps overprinted "V.R.I." and "E.R.I."; thousands appeared to think that a few pounds invested during the war would enable them to retire on reaching the Strand with their booty. They all bought to sell, and genuine collectors, finding the supply so excessive, have only required a little patience to benefit their pockets by acquiring at "greatly reduced prices," much under "face," from the would-be get-rich-quicks who wouldn't or couldn't wait. As a rule, however, it is the early bird who catches the worm, and only at such rare seasons of extraordinary national excitement are excessive booms possible; and the early bird must have some solid ground of knowledge and intelligence to guide him to the worm.
Early counterfeits and their exposers--The "honest" facsimile--"Album Weeds"--Forgeries classified--Frauds on the British Post Office--Forgeries "paying" postage--The One Rupee, India--Fraudulent alteration of values--The British 10s. and £1 "Anchor"--A too-clever "fake"--Joined pairs--Drastic tests--New South Wales "Views" and "Registered"--The Swiss Cantonals--Government "imitations"--"Bogus" stamps.
Mr. Edward L. Pemberton, whose early writings on Philately will always be regarded as little short of inspired from the marvellous intuition which led him to the precise and the accurate, wrote a booklet on "Forged Stamps, and How to Detect Them" in 1863. Already in the history of this new hobby the forger had been at work catering for collectors; it was, of course, from still earlier times that the unscrupulous had endeavoured to relieve Governments of some portions of their revenues by counterfeiting what is a kind of paper currency. Pemberton was not the first author on this subject, but I turn to him because he was the best of several contemporary writers in this as well as in other directions. Of this superiority he was not entirely unconscious, for in his "Introduction" he says: "We have tested the usefulness of the only English work on the 'Falsification of Postage Stamps,' having gone through it carefully, and after an impartial reading, feel convinced that, from the vagueness of the descriptions, both of the forgeries and genuine stamps, many persons testing stamps from them would select the forgery as genuine, and _vice versâ_."