France Precancel Stamps


Like other precancel stamps, French precancels - or préoblitérés - are stamps that have been cancelled before being affixed to pieces of mail.  Precancel stamps are often used by mass mailers such as advertisers and others conducting direct marketing campaigns because the postal administration usually reduces their price when large quantities are purchased. 

According to Michel, France has issued three different types of precancels, beginning in 1920.  The first two types were overprints with a two line inscription, one of "Postes Paris" and  the other with "Postes France."  Both types have the year printed below.  The third type of French precancel stamp used an overprint of a semicircle with “AFFRANCHts POSTES.”

Types of Stamp Cancellations & Postmarks: Part I


Precancels vs. Cancelled-to-Order (CTO) stamps:

Some stamp collectors may be a bit unclear about the difference between these two types of cancelled stamps, so we thought we'd give a bit of information about both of them. The key difference is that precanceled stamps are actually used on the mail.

Precancels:

Precanceled stamps are stamps that are cancelled before they're used on the mail. We know this might not make much sense, since stamps normally are cancelled after the mail they're on arrives at the post office for processing. But precancels were used in order to make mail processing faster - since the stamps were already canceled, the canceling process at the post office was bypassed.

Precancels were applied in one of two ways, either printed on the stamp or handstamped using a rubber stamp. In the US, precancels were printed by the federal government (usually called Bureau precancels, after the Bureau of Printing and Engraving), printed locally by local post offices, or handstamped at local post offices (not surprisingly, these latter two types are called local precancels). In the US and Canada, precancelled stamps were used for first class mail, parcel post and bulk mail. Some larger companies used them as a substitute for perfins - a security device to stop their employees from using the stamps for their personal mail or to sell. Precancels were generally used in other countries to mail newspapers.

Thousands of different precancels and varieties exist, and collecting precancelled stamps is both challenging and rewarding. Catalogs and lists of town precancelled stamps are readily available.


Canceled-to-Order (CTO) Stamps:

CTO stamps have been canceled by the issuing country's postal authority before their sale and are usually sold to stamp dealers for a reduced price. The stamp dealers then sell them to stamp collectors, often passing on their savings in the form of reduced prices. CTO stamps are not valid for postal use. They generally still have their full original gum, and the cancellations are almost always very neat and clear; often just a corner of the stamp is canceled so that the stamp design is not impacted. Many people collect CTO stamps because of their lower cost, and in fact the catalog prices for the stamps of some countries is for canceled-to-order stamps rather than postally used (which have a higher catalog value and cost more).

Many beautiful topical stamps are mainly available in CTO form. Don't turn your nose up at them, because they can be a way to inexpensively build a beautiful stamp collection.

Collecting Precanceled Stamps - Full of Variety and Challenge





Precancels (also spelled pre-cancels) have been around for more than 100 years. There are many thousands of varieties, and collecting precancels can present remarkable challenges yet still be pretty inexpensive. Precancel stamp specialists search for those varieties, along with stamp errors such as town or state mis-spellings.



What is a precanceled stamp? The earlier types of US precancels are overprinted stamps, sometimes locally applied, but more often applied by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. These earlier precancels typically consisted of a definitive, commemorative, parcel post, special delivery or Christmas stamp overprinted with a city or town name between two horizontal bars or lines. That practice ended in the 1970s and 1980s, when the US began to produce service-inscribed stamps such as the Butte Nonprofit coil stamp. This type of precancel features the words "bulk rate," "nonprofit," "presorted" and the like as a part of the stamp design itself rather than having any overprint.



But no matter which type, a precancel is what it sounds like: a stamp that has been canceled before being used to carry the mail. Less processing is required by the postal service when precancels are used, so they can be sold at a lower cost to their users. But mailers must have special permits on file in order to take advantage of their reduced price and use precanceled stamps as postage. Most individuals do not qualify.



Because of the plethora of available types of overprints (many different states and even more different cities and towns) as well as the many different stamps that were overprinted, collecting precancels is challenging yet fascinating. How does one begin?



Perhaps the best way is to sort the stamps by city and state. They can then be organized by set, such as the Presidential issue or the later Liberty series. They can be mounted on album pages created by the collector or placed in stock pages.



Precancels are a hot stamp collecting specialty and precancel study groups exist throughout the United States. The Precancel Stamp Society has even created a reference book to assist collectors in identifying the different types, varieties and errors: the Catalog of United States Bureau Precancels.