5$000/1$300 and 5$000/20$000 Questionable Covers

Any serious collector of this flight has most certainly encountered the covers this article is considering, and even have a few in his collection. Even I have them as samples, then these covers are really frauds. They are not forgeries, then the stamps and cancels are the real McCoy. Just the whole cover is a postdated fraud. They come in two versions, both displayed below.

Any experienced philatelist, upon looking at these covers, will sense alarms going off. All covers I've seen so far, have on the front the addressee as Herm. Stoltz & Cia. In Recife and on the back usually L. Prouvot of Rio. Although the letter, supposedly is a Rio-Recife cover, the stamps are actually first canceled in Recife special cancel(28.5.30), whereas the Rio cancel is always a rdj4 (25.5.30): a definite warning. Also Condor picture postcards, a plane been loaded with the slogan “então vamos” are also known.

My opinion is the same that Ahrens has in his papers (a copy kindly given to me by Wittig years ago) and in a letter to a very prominent collector in Germany in 1978, that these covers are manufactured covers using the remainders of both stamps. There, according to Ahrens, a lot of them floating around in Brazil and even used as gifts to business partners overseas. While not completely outright forgeries, I considered these postdated, hand back covers as cute little nothings, philatelically worthless.