Large Mail

I had a friend send me some fenders for an old car I am restoring. We discussed how to ship them and in the end decided he would just mail them to me. He paid the post office the charge and only when they showed up here did we find some PO employee had to attach all of this. One obviously wonders why. What was the story? Was the meter thingy broken or was this an attempt to clean out a drawer or maybe it was punishment. The problem is I don't throw away stamps and they're too big for a stock book.




What would you do?
OG

Whoa! Very cool! I don't collect covers or stamps on piece, but somebody out there is certain to pay more than few bucks for it.

Thanks for sharing the piece!

I would mount it in a frame. Are any of the stamps canceled? I would expect pen cancels by the marker monkey whom obviously had a coil of stamps to use up.

I just noticed the 2 higher value stamps on the 2nd picture. Those would add value.

Old Gum:

Why did the postal employee use all these 21¢ stamps on your parcel? Simple. The USPS is tight for cash, and they are not permitted to return definitive stamps. (Do you remember about five years ago when the USPS destroyed a bunch of old definitives and they caught hell from Congress for destroying perfectly useable stamps?) They must use them up, now.

So.... knowing that the pile of 21¢ stamps they had at that post office might take forever to get rid of; and seeing an opportunity to add A LOT of postage to a parcel, they put two and two together and used them up on your parcel.

Thoughts?

David

I would promote that PO employee to Post Master. Be lucky some good ones are still out there.

Good grief that must have taken hours to lick and stick

Yeah, more than likely this was to use up obsolete postage in someone's drawer.

I used to do that all the time, and use them on the master Change of Address cards people would fill out -- the ones that would stay in the Post Office. Usually meter tapes were used, but I made sure to always use stamps, especially high values. And I always made sure they had nice, legible CDS cancels.

Why? Because when their Change of Address expired, the cards would go into the garbage, and I could get them back again.




BTW, Old Gum -- what kind of car are you restoring?

Yes every stamp on both pieces have a real hand cancel (Belalton Md.), no markers here.
I'm thinking David is right. When looking at the second one I get the impression they started here with high values then shifted strategy. There was originally plenty of room for more small values (size of a car fender). I cut them down to what you see.

WpgLwr, it is a '66 Bronco

OG


edited to answer WpgLwr

Harry most of those stamps would be self adhesive not lick and stick. I say that postal employee did an outstanding job. I would imagine that there was not a line behind the sender at the time postage & cancels were applied.

Unfortunately, our local post mistress would have found it too great of a BOTHER to do something like that! What a cool idea for us collectors.

Gussyboy1

Here's my largest example:

Not too bad, Gussyboy1. My largest ever example was 60 on a letter a friend got from Vietnam. They merely cancelled all the stamps, folded along the perfs to the size of the envelope and stapled the whole lot to the back of it. They were commemoratives, too, about four times the size of a "regular" definitive.

Here is my most recent one, found in a box of kiloware. Unfortunately, some of them on the edge are pretty ragged and will have to go, but a block of 36 perfins isn't too bad...

What a great number of stamps on 1 piece. Wouldn't 1 or 2 high denomination stamps have a better value used ?

All I can say is HOLY COW! I have received some with what I thought was a ton of stamps.....not even close.

look at all of these I have several sheets like these