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.