Honokaa, HI Ebay Listing For "Official Mail" Precancels

I never heard of an Official Mail precancel before. Furthermore, the stamps to which the precancels are applied were only issued in the 1990's which was well after most precancels were in use. Why would there be need to cancel an Official Mail stamp to begin with? It seems to me that no one could use the stamps unless they were on Official Government Mail, so what was the point?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HAWAII-Prec...t_500wt_1361

Or is this just a made up precancel intended for stamp collecting use only?

wt1,

This is a first for me as well. Hopefully someone else will chime in because you now have me curious as well! Interesting.

There is no reason that this was done under normal postal usage.
Many small towns PO's would precancel stamps by favor. This may be an example of such a favor.
Also some devices have ended up in the hands of collectors and would precancel all sorts of stamps in small numbers!

Thanks. I thought there was little point to there being need to precancel an Official Mail stamp. Nevertheless, it does make an interesting conversation piece, I suppose.

However, it will be interesting to monitor this ebay listing to see if the bids increase over the next 6 days of their auction, to determine just how much one is willing to pay for such a stamp.

People will bid & buy these oddballs, strangely interesting!

Before the USPS slapped the precancel collectors on their canceling hand, you could walk into any post office and if they had a precanceling device, cancel your own stamps to your hearts content. One purist precancel dealer/collector who bleed precancels didn't believe that this situation was right, so he wrote to the USPS and they issued an order to each post office to destroy all precanceling devices as they and the service they rendered were no longer needed at the local level.

Probably most precancels on commems and stamps after the great american series were favors, maybe even before that.

PP

Just checked the previous link and with only 5 hours 3 hours to go, the bids increased from $1.29 to $12.50 $16.50 for what is basically a "favor" precancel that never saw postal use.

Sold for $16.50.

Another Official Mail precancel set (but with different denominations) has just shown up for auction with the same Honokaa, HI precancel. Seems the seller must have a hoard of these and are trying to sell them slowly:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HAWAII-Prec...t_500wt_1361