US Slogan Cancels

Here's two Universal machine "Save The Redwoods" slogan cancels from Eureka, Calif. Although it was the back of the second card that made me want it, the slogan cancel was a bonus!

My Great Grandfather, James Simpson, was the general contractor for the building of the burning Humboldt County, California Court House in Eureka in the mid-1880s. I still have a brick from the building when it was torn down after a major earthquake in about 1954 made it unsafe to continue use.

Your great grand dad did nice work. Looks like the firemen needed a contractor for the scaffolding up around the tower!

I'm in the process of looking for commemoratives that have either corresponding or meaningful slogan cancels. It's the fun of the search all over again.

A favorite from my slogan cancel cover collection:

The label is an additional nice touch.

I agree with cbustapeck, I like the appropriate pairing of cancels and stamps. Here are some starting with early expo advertising slogans. The the more recent National Stamp Collecting Month slogans can be fun too. (All cropped from full covers/cards.)

































Or in this case *not* a quality example!

Seeing the Winston Churchill with Pray for Peace cancel reminded me that I have a mini-collection of these. The US government does not encourage us to pray much anymore. Very old fashioned but worth remembering.

I really appreciate everyone sharing these, because it makes it a little bit easier to find the cancels when I see partials on a stamp.

Has anyone tried to do an online index, either visual or text-based, of slogan cancels? A copy of Moe Luff's book passed through my hands recently, and I took the liberty of scanning it, but the text is not sufficiently straight to readily OCR. I ask because it would be so handy to be able to figure out what a cancel is based on a small part of the text.

John Becker - You actually found one of the New York World's Fair cancels on the corresponding stamp! I've seen at least a hundred examples of that cancel - probably more - but somehow not on that stamp. It kind of boggles my mind.

Chasa - Very cool. Wouldn't it be fun to collect a complete run of the stamps from that period, all with that cancel? They're definitely readily available enough to do so.

Does this count, even though it is without text?


It's one of my favorites. The image is of Long Island, New York, blended in with the usual cancel stripes. I like the subtlety of it. It works especially well when the cancellation isn't so solid and blends in more with the envelope.

I think the Long Island outline is also the only pictorial flats cancel:


I report this flats cancel being known 11/16/1987 - 9/5/1995, LKU shown here, as listed in my monograph on flats machine cancels for the Machine Cancel Society, 1995, so likely still in use somewhat later. Not common due to the poor survival/saving rate for large-sized mail.

Thank you for sharing that!

A few more especially fun slogan cancels arrived yesterday, including ones for Campfire Girls, Boy Scouts, the Hawaii Cancer Society, and one that looks suspiciously like a Packers helmet.