German Stamp With Unusual Date

Picked up this stamp recently.



Any comments on the date?

This is new to me as well.

Maybe there are other more informed members in this forum who can enlighten us?

Chimo

Bujutsu

Forgot to mention in my last posting that I noticed that cancel reads "Briefzentrum" 30, or stamp central and was wondering if this stamp was not cancelled from it original place of sending and they cancelled it there before going on to the addressee??.

I understand that Germany has a few offices that cancel mail that have not been cancelled previously from the original post office of sending and maybe this is one of them??

Just a thought.

Chimo

Bujutsu

Nice stamp! I like the way they included the description in Swedish as well as German. Sweden issued a stamp with the same design at the same time as part of a set of three.

I'm afraid I've no idea about the zero date but I believe the cancellation is from the mail centre for the Hannover region (#30) in Pattensen.

Beautifully SON.
Interesting,
There's a story there somewhere :)

I asked a German collector/friend about the stamp. He called it a "Vorausentwertung" which, if my German is accurate, basically translates to a precancel. That would also explain the SON.

Hope that helps!
Dan

That's exactly right Rod. Unfolding it makes stamp collecting fascinating for me.




I assume that means "Socked on the Nose." Please excuse my ignorance. This is also interesting as most post marks tie the stamp to the envelope. This one doesn't. It is almost too perfect.




It does explain the 'Socked on the Nose'-ness of the stamp very well but it doesn't explain why so many of us have never seen it before, unless precancels are uncommon, or perhaps only new in Germany.

I do not collect (and therefore know very little) about German stamps, but I did an image search on the internet and came up with this example from a discontinued web site:



By the look of this example, it seems to me it was the US equivalent to a mailer's postmark or precancel or from a similar mass mailing type of use. The date is the same, which leads me to believe that the original example is not particularly unique.

Hope it helps.

It adds quite a bit. Thanks wt1. Thanks to all the others too!

Great sleuths gentlemen, well done.

"Entgelt bezahlt" means "postage paid". In UPU terms, that's "taxe perçue" or "charge collected". It's the kind of thing you'd see from mass mailers who have a postal permit for sending mail into the stream without requiring them to go through the cancellation machines.

For those interested in the UPU's letter post regulations, I came across them while looking for a proper translation for "taxe perçue".

http://www.upu.int/en/activities/le...cuments.html

Ryan