One way of acquiring new items for a stamp collection is by buying them on online auction websites. There are many great items available online, but also many fakes. But what is real and what isn’t? Also, even if real, not everything is as important or interesting as it might be described by the seller or the auctioneer.
One interesting example are the two items shown here. They come from a Korean auction website and purport to be a set of two newspapers with overprinted 1895 Taegeuk stamps. Are these useful for your collection or not? We asked our in-house expert from the Bund Philatelistischer Prüfer, Florian Eichhorn, what his ideas were regarding these items. Here is his answer:
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This leaves one thing to be answered. How much did the seller ask for these items? You’d be surprised to learn the actual amount: 13.000.000 won… (that’s 9900 EUR or 10.950 USD!)
Addendum: yes, for both journals below the stamp/postmark there are some written lines in hangul syllabics pretending to be an actual address of a subscriber. Still the issuance date and the postmark date (invariable around 1900.4.16) show a difference of several months.