"François Fournier (1846–1917) operated as a forger in Geneva from 1904 onwards.  According to Varro Tyler’s Philatelic Forgers, Their Lives and Works, Fournier, unlike many of his contemporary forgers, did not seek to defraud the public.  He described his material as facsimiles and promoted it to collectors who could not afford to purchase genuine items and to uneducated collectors as a preventive measure against being their being deceived by dishonest stamp dealers.

Following Fournier's death, his former employee, Charles Hirschburger, continued the business until his own death in 1927. Subsequently, in order to prevent the stock from falling into unscrupulous hands, l’Union Philatélique de Genève purchased the entire lot, some 400 kilograms in weight, from Hirschburger’s widow.

After printing the word ‘FAUX’ on the front or the word ‘FAC-SIMILÉ’ on the back of the forgeries, representative selections were mounted on album pages by students from the Geneva School of Arts and Crafts.  These pages were housed in 480 special loose-leaf albums which were sold in 1928 to interested individuals and organizations.  The balance of the stock was burned. Over the years many of these albums have been broken up to satisfy the demands of collectors of individual countries."  The preceding is an introduction to the subject from the web site of noted professional philatelist James Bendon.

The albums prepared included samples of actual stamps prepared or or the types of overprints applied by Fournier.
 

                                               Forged Cancellation                                                                      Forged Overprint

An original album from the l’Union Philatélique de Genève is a great rarity.  If you have high speed Internet access, please click on the graphic to see the original page from which these Fournier forgeries were obtained.  The entire page is from Album 442 of 480.

If you have low speed Internet access (dial-up) or if you would like a copy of the image for offline study, please right click here  and do a "Save Target As" to download the graphics file to your hard drive.   The image file is over 1.5 megabytes in size.