Wolfgang Maassen: 19th-century forgers and forgeries. ‘Spiro facsimiles’ – A documentation. Part 3: The ‘Amerikas’

(p*c/pcp) In 2022, the first volume of this special book series was published, dedicated to the Spiro family – a family from Hamburg (the 255-page book appeared in both German and English). In this work, the well-known author and philatelic historian Wolfgang Maaßen dispelled all the myths that had been circulating about this Hamburg family for more than 150 years. He not only examined the life of the family and their professional activities in the 19th century, but also succeeded in proving that the Spiros were only distributors, but not producers of the countless facsimiles that have been attributed to them to date. In this story of fact and fiction, he also devoted individual chapters to the products and ‘productions’, but already indicated at the time that only individual volumes of documentation would be able to cover these encyclopedically.

The first volume of this documentation was published in 2023 as Part 1: Germany, and in fact in two languages (English/German). On 272 pages, the author presented countless, mostly complete facsimile sheets of old German stamps, which are mostly only known as single items. The second volume, ‘Part 3: The “Americas”’, was published in March 2025, also in two languages and with a respectable length of almost 400 pages! The quantity of material is almost overwhelming, because some 25 countries are presented in these so-called facsimiles in sheet form! The first two volumes of this series have already been awarded the Grand Gold medal nationally at DEBRA 2024, and the new volume is unlikely to be outdone, because the material presented here is also being shown worldwide for the first time in this abundance.

Part 4 (Africa) is almost ready to print with 212 pages, but will not be published until autumn 2025. Part 2 (Europe) is considerably more extensive and still requires further work, as does the last part, Part 5 (Asia/Oceania), both of which are planned for 2026/27.

DIN A4 format, 386 pages, in colour, hardcover, thread-stitched, retail price: €75.00 plus shipping costs, available from: Phil*Creativ Verlag, Vogelsrather Weg 27, 41366 Schwalmtal, Germany, Tel. ++49 (0) 21 63/48 66, E-Mail: faktura@philcreativ.de