American Commemorative Cancellations/Souvenir Pages.are They Still Being Produced?

I picked up a couple of boxes of these and have been playing/sorting with them.

I know they started as unofficial productions when people would (somehow) get USPS posters and use them for FDC cancels, then they were the official "Souvenir Pages" starting in 1972, and at some point they became "American Commemorative Cancellations"...but I just spent ages searching the usps collector's area and I can't see them offered anywhere on their site. Have they been discontinued? Thanks,

Scott

Still available, seemingly: http://www.asppp.org/cancellation_pages.htm

Many thanks!

That said, I'm still shocked that the guys who make them have no mention of them...the commem panels are listed at store.usps.com, but every search term I can think of can't even find mention of the pages on the site!
Scott

They're expensive as hell because they charge face plus. I bought a lot chock full of them, many never even taken out of the original shipping envelope and the receipts came to absurd totals. At a certain point I feel like they just charge the card on file and send send send until the collector realizes how expensive they are and cancels. I sell them on ebay starting at a buck and the only ones that get bid on are high face values really

The USPS is still making them but is behind in the production and shipping. I've been collecting them since the onset (1972). The last shipment, called waves, was in Jan 2023. It included the 2022 Katherine Graham, $2 & $5 Floral Geometry, Nancy Reagan, Mariachi, Pete Seeger and Go Beyond. The last ad that I can find for them was in the 2022 Quarter 3 of the USPS Philatelic catalog. The ASPPP hasn't been very active for a while.

I have just gone through all my albums containing Commemorative Panels (over 600, I stopped collecting after around panel 600 as it became rather too expensive).
I've always known there was a problem with the first few dozens of panels that were supposedly made with thick paper that was acidic. Acidic paper will degrade and turn yellow over time and thin paper becomes very brittle. It was also mentioned around 1972/1973 to remove the panels from the plastic shrink wrapping as it was considered "not archival" grade plastic.
What I have to summarize is rather disturbing:

1. None of the still shrink-wrapped panels show any degradation. I have some very early ones and late ones still shrink-wrapped.
2. Most of my Commemorative panels removed from the plastic shrink-wrap have turned brownish yellow along the edges, and some almost through the entire sheet. However, there is a clear difference in the amount of paper degradation, depending on where the panels were stored in.

It turns out there were two different kinds of Commemorative Panel albums (the brown ones with gold inscription)
a) Albums that were covered with a brown sheet glued onto the inside front and back covers.
b) Albums that were covered with a white sheet glued onto the inside front and back covers.
.
All panels inside the brown type albums a) are (sometimes heavily) ruined by degradation.
No panels inside the white type albums b) show degradation.

So right now I have a ton of ugly looking Commemorative Panels showing brownish paper instead of white paper..

Luckily in Switzerland wthere is a company that does mass deacidification for libraries on a large scale. Unfortunately the process applied here is only stopping the deterioration, not removing existing deterioration.

So if you also have Commemaorative panels in those albums, first thing is to throw away all albums with the brown inside cover sheets. Do not remove the shrink-wrapping, ever, if your panels are still wrapped.

Next thing is more important to me:
Does anyone have experience with removing the sulphurization in the panels?
Results of experiments with hydroperoxide solutions (plus additional secret ingredients?) would be most welcomed as I am approaching the thought of having a bonfire made of $2000+ panels...

Thank you for posting your experiences and for raising this subject. As you mention, the rates of acidification have a huge dependency upon the surrounding environmental conditions. As such this means that unless we can compile a significant number of experiences from different environments it will be difficult to draw reliable conclusions. But I think that there are several things that can be said with a high level of confidence.

- Unless the Post Office used very costly true archival (rag based, no lignin) paper**, acidification is going to be an issue over time. The paper they used is not rag paper and contains lignin; it will begin to turn acidic over time.
- The rate of acidification will increase significantly if the environmental conditions are less than ideal. To minimize the acidification process, a cool, dry and stable storage environment is paramount; temperatures should be held at a constant 70°F with a relative humidity held between 30% and 50% (or as close as possible).
- Some types of 'plastic wrapping' can be harmful by themselves. But any non-porous enclosure can be a double-edged sword; either offering some protection from a poor external environment or withholding a poor internal environment. If paper is stored in a sheet protector, plastic wrapping or any other non-porous enclosure it adds another environmental variable that will need to be controlled and monitored.
- For further information, the document "NBSIR 83-2795 Air Quality Criteria for Storage of Paper-Based Archival Records" can be downloaded here https://stampsmarter.org/learning/H...General.html
- The level of acidification in any paper can be better understood if the paper is tested. There are inexpensive pens which use reagents to visually indicate the pH of paper. Note that these are permanent markers so may not be suitable for testing on collectable paper, but sacrificing and maintaining one Commemorative Panel as a test subject might be wise. https://www.amazon.com/Lineco-Testi...p/B000KNJCSS

In terms of sulphurization and hydrogen peroxide treatments…
This is another area which is sometimes misunderstood and includes many personal observations. One of the problems with the observations that I have seen is that there exists little or no control over two of the most important related variables;
- Strength of the hydrogen peroxide
- Length of time of the exposure
Hydrogen peroxide is not a stable solution and can quickly lose strength after opening. A new, just opened 3% bottle of hydrogen peroxide is not the same strength as a one year old 3% bottle. So if using an existing, older open bottle of peroxide makes it anyone's guess at what its actual strength it might be. And of course this ties back into how long the exposure might need to be to develop a meaningful sulphurization remediation treatment.
Don


** True archival paper is typically defined as meeting or exceeding the following specs;
- High alpha cellulose pulp from purified wood fiber with 25% Cotton
- Buffered with calcium carbonate 2-3% alkaline reserve, pH 9 ±0.5, acid–free.
- Board passes the PAT (Photographic Activity Test) ISO IT 18916 (formerly ISO 14523 ANSI IT9.16).
- Sulfur content is less than 0.0008% reducible sulfur
- Lignin content is tested by TAPPI 236 cm-85 and has a Kappa number of less than five.

Yes I should have added that the albums were stored without any direct or indirect sunlight getting close. Also the climate I live in is not humid or hot.
I have a good experience with polymer degradation (I've worked on Chemiluminescence a few years at the University and in the "plastic industry") so I'm pretty sure I noticed if "Plastic goes wrong". I did some quick checks on the plastic sheets (after a few years of owning albums) and they were still ok (transparency spectra, that thing that measures Hooke's law - "Zugmaschine" in German). After almost 40 years, they still look and feel ok.
Those two plastic stiffeners in the albums are eye-openers. In the "brown" albums, they are now brittle and/or totally brown, in the "white" albums, they look like new. So the culprits are the brown cover sheets glued into the insides of the covers. They must be highly acidic.

I collect the older souvenir pages ones and have most up to around 2000 so some nearing 45 years. The cost a lot new but easy to get quite inexpensively in the after market.

The paper quality reminds me of school construction paper. For the lots I purchased, one batch had toning in the top 1/2-inch or so likely due to exposure to sunlight. I have plenty of spares (trades available) so may do an pH pen test on some.

From early 80's.

This is how the stiffeners look like (all from middle 70s):



Top: Really degraded one
Middle: Brittle one, most broken at ring holes
Bottom: From "white" album

dk - just this week I worked on a large batch of them. I do not own them, so I do not know how they were stored and I didn't notice the brown vs white. Some were still in their shrink wrap and looked ok. Others were in those brown binders and some of them definitely had noticeable edge toning (and this is not the first time I have seen this). Same with the "stiffeners" being brittle. Here is some new info - the plastic pages in one of the binders had shrunk horizontally (but not vertically) - I discovered this because I had to open the binder to move around some pages and they were a royal pain to get back in because the plastic was narrower than the black paper so the holes didn't line up. It is quite ironic that they warn you that the shink wrapping is not suitable for philatelic archiving but their album solution turned out to be far worse.

At left: "Brown" inside sheet covers, at right: "White" inside sheet covers.
"White" albums are slightly taller than "Brown" albums (lens distortion exxagerates the difference).

Deteriorated Front and Back view of an early panel.

Link to commemorative panels.

https://store.usps.com/store/result...hdpvZ1j49vgd

I had a link to how to subscribe to the souvenir pages but cannot find it.

Given the images above, it appears to me that the binders are made with low grade cardboard. All question of this can be removed if someone removed the paper and tested the underlying cardboard with a pH pen tester.
Don

I had asked the group here how to subscribe to souvenir page program. Someone provided me the phone number to stamp fulfillment services. I never got around to calling to inquire on the cost.