(Privately Cancelled?) US Mint Stamps

I'm trying to help the widow of a deceased stamp collector. He had many US mint stamps that had a line drawn through the lower right corner (appears to be with a ballpoint pen!). Any idea what this is? My error. I needed to better describe what I have. These are fairly recent US stamps, e.g. Douglas Fairbanks, Elvis Presley, Oklahoma!, William Saroyan, etc. They are MNH except for the drawn line.

Could be a revenue stamp, could be mid to late 1800's manuscript (Hand or pen) cancels. Without pictures / scans no way to tell for sure.

Wow, that is really weird. Why ruin stamps with a pen?

Curious. You don't mean a black line through the value of the stamp do you?

If so, they're not stamps

Something to do with reproducing them on a Xerox machine. This makes it supposedly impossible to copy them and use them as legitimate?

Peter

kirk I have several stamps with the line through the value. You say they're not stamps. Then what are they?

When I worked as a temporary carrier during the Christmas seasons in the USPS back in the 1950's we were instructed to draw a diagonal line with a ball point pen through any unpostmarked stamp we happened to spot while delivering.

The ones I have. The lines are put on the stamp by a machine. I also am sure the ones I have are the Flag issue just like pictured above. They are not hand drawn. In fact I just looked in the Mystic Catalog and several of the newer modern stamps have a diagonal line on the stamp. Some through the value and some through Forever.

Nobody has answered. Why the lines on these stamps? What do they mean? They surely aren't precanceled are they?

"Nobody has answered"? I believe I did at least try? This thing came up way back, maybe in the sixties. The postal service was afraid of fraud. If I remember well, they passed a couple of regulations about the publication of stamp images. They could only be shown either smaller or larger than life, and with a line through the denomination so the stamps could not be reproduced on a copy machines!

Peter

Thanks Peter for answering. I don't know why a copy machine couldn't copy a stamp with a line drawn on it. Some lines were like in the picture through the denomination and some were drawn through Forever and some through the writing.

Ok after looking closely. The first one I found was 1995 Scott#3001 and the last one is 2013 and Scott #4765.
They are a hit and miss. Not every stamp. Peter not to dispute you but I think there was something else. Some other reason for the lines. Not every stamp has them.

Sure would like to see some sort of image of these...


-IBFS

Way further back than 1995 I found some 1917 Scott # 523 and #524 I will pursue this mystery and hopefully someone else will know the answer. It might have something to do with private printers rather than the Federal Bureau of Engraving.

These scans don't look like actual stamps to me. They look like illustration cut-outs from the USPS quarterly, "USA Philatelic".

This is the explanation:




Documented at the bottom of the page at this link:

http://www.secretservice.gov/money_...ations.shtml

Note the bold sentence above, the requirement for a line through the denomination (or the word "Forever" if non-denominated) relates to illustrations less than three-fourths (75%) or more than one and one-half times (150%) the size of the genuine stamp.

For those who have a copy of USA Philatelic you will note the USPS includes cancellation lines only when the illustration sizes (noted next to each stamp illustration) falls within those size categories.

For example, in USA Philatelic (Q4, 2014), pages 2 and 3 show the Winter Fun stamps at 180% and the Rudolph stamps at 155% and the Silver Bells Global Forever stamp at 160%. Since they all fall outside the parameters of the above dimensions they DO NOT have a line drawn through them.

On the other hand, on page 6, the Batman Stamps DO have a cancellation line drawn through them as they are reproduced at 80% and thus fall within the parameters requiring cancellation per the Law.

It follows on through to the rest of the USA Philatelic Catalog, too.