Ink and Fire

Caracas, 1858. A decree orders that Venezuela's mail be paid for with small pieces of gummed paper that almost nobody has ever seen: stamps.

Santos Aguirre is fourteen years old, working on the wharf at La Guaira the day the crates from Philadelphia come off the brig Joseph: yellow, blue and red, the colors of the flag. That afternoon he decides that his life will be ink.

For forty-two years he will be an apprentice, a lithographer, an expert and at last a master printer, and his trade will put him at the center of every secret of the century. The counted pearls of the Eagles, whose exact position slept in a sealed sheet known to three men. The stamps that paid for Guzmán Blanco's schools. The overprints with which each revolution marked the paper of the one before it. The fraud that brought down a prosecutor and three printer brothers. And the sheet of a hundred copies that a piece of carelessness in New York turned into the jewel of Venezuelan philately: the Black Bolívar.

Facing him, all his life, will be Belisario Fonseca. The other apprentice. The one who learned the same trade in order to use it backward, and who one afternoon in 1859 asked the question Santos would take forty years to answer: would a forgery done well be more legitimate than the legitimate one?

The characters are invented. The issues, the decrees, the frauds and the stamp burnings are not. Every act quoted in this novel exists, is identified one by one in the appendix, and can be checked against the digitized holdings of the Biblioteca Filatélica de Venezuela.

Ink and Fire is the first volume of the Chronicles of the Post. Each volume stands on its own.