Spotting Fake Antique Postcards at UK Fairs

Why reproductions turn up on so many stalls

Antique postcards are the perfect collecting hobby: small, cheap, beautiful and easy to store in a shoebox. That last quality also makes them easy to copy. A decent scan of a 1906 seaside view can be reprinted for pennies, aged with a weak tea wash, and slipped into a dealer's box at a village hall fair for £4. It looks plausible at arm's length, which is exactly the problem.

The good news is that reproductions almost always give themselves away in the hand. Take a loupe, a small torch and ten minutes of patience, and you will spot the vast majority of them before you reach for your wallet.

Start with the paper and card

Genuine Edwardian and interwar cards were printed on card stock with a particular feel: slightly stiff, faintly creamy or greyish, often with a subtle tooth to the surface. Hold one and it warms up slowly in your fingers. Modern reprints are usually on thinner, brighter, harder card that feels slick and cold, sometimes with a plasticky sheen under a light.

• Look at the edge in raking light. Real card has a fibrous, slightly ragged cut edge. Reprints are guillotined to a glassy smoothness.
• Check for foxing. Genuine ageing shows as small, scattered brown speckles, irregular in size and spacing. Fake ageing looks like splash marks with dark tidelines where the liquid dried.
• Smell it, discreetly. Old paper has a dry, faintly dusty smell. Fresh ink and coated card smell new, and that is a warning sign rather than proof.
• Compare the back. In Britain, undivided backs were the norm until 1902, when the divided back arrived. A card with a divided back and a printed date of 1898 is a contradiction.

Postmarks are the hardest thing to fake well

A real postmark is struck by hand or machine onto a finished card. The ink sits on the surface, the pressure varies, and the impression is often slightly smudged, doubled or faint at one edge. Look closely at where the circle crosses the picture: on a genuine card the line breaks up over the gloss of the image and bites deeper into the matt card around it.

On a reproduction, the postmark is part of the printed image. It is uniformly crisp, sits perfectly flat, and shares exactly the same ink tone as everything else on the card. Other tells:

• The postmark carefully avoids the stamp, or runs over it in a way that lines up too neatly.
• The date does not match the subject. A 1907 postmark on a card showing a 1930s charabanc is a straightforward error.
• The handwriting of the message is printed, not written. Under a loupe you will see halftone dots or pixel edges instead of the furrow a nib leaves in the paper.
• The stamp itself is printed as part of the scene, with no gum, no perforation shadow and no impression in the card beneath it.

Corners, edges and printer's marks

This is where the summary advice earns its keep: sharp corners are suspicious. A card that has supposedly survived since 1905 has usually been handled, posted, stored in albums and shuffled. Expect slightly rounded corners, tiny nibbles, a little scuffing along the top edge and faint album marks on the back.

Of course, some genuine cards were never posted and stayed in a drawer, so sharp corners alone prove nothing. Combine it with printer's marks. Genuine cards often carry a small publisher's imprint, a series number, or the words Printed in Germany — a great many British cards were printed in Bavaria and Saxony before 1914. On a reprint, that small text is often smeared, illegible or missing altogether, because the copy was made from a low-resolution scan. Genuine fine type is small but clean.

Ink, colour and a pocket torch

Genuine early cards were lithographed, letterpressed or produced as real photographic prints. Real photographic cards have continuous tone: under a 10x loupe you see smooth gradations, not a pattern. Lithographs and later colour cards show a printed dot structure, but it is irregular and period-appropriate. A modern reprint of a photographic card often shows a regular rosette of halftone dots or visible pixel stair-stepping, because it was scanned and reprinted.

A small UV torch is a genuinely useful fairground tool. Many modern papers contain optical brightening agents that fluoresce blue-white under ultraviolet light. Most card from before the 1950s does not. If a supposedly Victorian card glows like a supermarket receipt, put it down.

Before you hand over your money

• Ask the stallholder plainly: is this an original or a modern reproduction? Most are honest, and many mark reprints in pencil on the back.
• Ask to take the card out of its sleeve and hold it to the light. Refusal is informative.
• Request a written receipt describing the card and its date. At a one-day fair, that is your only comeback.
• Be wary of a stall where every card is immaculate. Uniform perfection across a whole box usually means a single source, and often a modern one.
• Buy one card first, take it home, and examine it properly in daylight. Learn from it before you buy the next ten.

None of this is about being paranoid. It is about slowing down enough to enjoy the hobby properly — and the little thrill of holding a card that really was posted from Whitby in 1911 is worth the extra minute's scrutiny.