German precancels

[greencan]

Hello, I found in my albums some precancels. There are some comments in German on the pages. As I found out they were canceled because of change of rollers in printing house in 1923. I also have list of differences between, I believe, old rollers and new ones.



What do you think of them? Are precancels interesting for some reason? 1923 it was the time after the World War, so I can't imagine why they had to change rollers. Or it was because of some progress in printing? Do you think they are interesting for some historical reason? I think they are authentic, why would anyone falsify precancels.



Looking forward for some answers, greetings!

[rayb]

German precancels WOULD be interesting. Why? Because none are known to exist.
These are uncancelled surcharges. That does not mean they are not interesting. But they are not precancels!

[Deleted]

Oct 15, 2014 10:59:15 GMT -5 rayb said:

German precancels WOULD be interesting. Why? Because none are known to exist.
These are uncancelled surcharges. That does not mean they are not interesting. But they are not precancels!

Stunning and informative fact.
I was certainly ignorant of this fact.
Indeed I am pretty foxed with pre cancels period!

[rayb]

"Indeed I am pretty foxed with pre cancels period!"

Look at it like this:

You run a large business in the days when there was no email, anything you wanted to send out went through the postal service. On certain days you have literally thousands of identical envelopes all due to be sent off at once – the latest issue of a magazine, a hot-off-the-press catalogue, an invitation to a special offer. To be fair to all your customers you want them all to be sent out at the same time.

So you arrive at your local Post Office, which if your business is out of town may well be a small one, in a lorry containing 10000 catalogues. You hand them over to the clerk (possibly the only clerk) and he is not allowed to put them into the postal system until he has hand-cancelled the stamp on every single one. Every time someone else come in, he has to leave your gigantic pile of catalogues to deal with them.

The chance of your mail being swiftly dealt with all in one go is remote. So what do you do?

Well, if you lived in the USA, France, Canada, Belgium, Netherlands, Monaco or a few other countries and if your order was big enough, you could order a supply of precancelled stamps from the postal authorities. These usually bore the name of a specific post office or area. So you could prepare in advance all your envelopes, addressed and with a precancelled stamp stuck on. The moment your catalogues arrived you could put them straight into the envelope and run the whole lot round to the specified post office; and because they were precancelled the clerk could put them straight into the postal system. They did not have to be handstamped; they were already precancelled and noone who received the catalogue could soak the stamp off and try to use it on their own mail, because they would only be accepted in bulk at the specified PO from someone known to work for a company that had purchased precancels.

Does that help?

If you want illustrations here is a thread which contains pictures from swish513, myself and others :Precancels