A Fun Lot Of Early French Cancels

Just received this lot today. An intersting variety of cancels, some very well struck. Some neat multiples and gutter pairs as well.

The bovine perfin is... umm... "unique".

A good variety there. A very nice selection.

If your are not familiar with this website yet, this French website is a big help:

http://marcophilie.org

Use Google to translate it.

WOW, that's an unusual lot - very fascinating cancels! What are those small circular cancels with 2-digit numbers? I haven't seen them before. Good luck with the cancel-identification

Hi Blaamand. The small circled numbers are new year cancels I believe although the numbers may indicate something else as the dates don't quite match.

This is a really lovely lot. I notice you have forerunner postmarks from Tlemcen and Jemmapda (?) in Algeria on the first sheet.

AnthonyUK - Thanks for the clarification, I've never even heard about new years cancels. It's really nice with all the new knowledge one can pick up from others in this forum! Quite a spread in (new)years tough (18)70 - (19)50? Presume the roman numbers in the small circles will be something similar?

I really appreciate the forerunners - but even more the 'lozange ancre' (1st page - Ceres 80c). Being a sailor myself I really find any maritime post items appealing. Lucky you, revenuecollector!

The marcophilie site also mentions some circled numerals used by the Paris bureaus which may be a better fit for some of the numbers.

Some highlights for me are the 40c on the first page with a Paris star and a London paid and anything in blue which is pretty unusual.

There is a 50c sower on the last page which is overprinted (B.I.T) rather than having a special cancel.
There are a lot that I haven't seen before!

I thought that the variety of cancels was very intriguing. The seller did the lot no favors though, as there was only one image of the 7 pages overlapping one another. The first time through the 7-day auction cycle there were no bids and the second time through I was the only bidder. It was a bit of a gamble.

I too like the maritime cancels with anchors.

The 50c sower with B.I.T. overprint is actually Scott listed, #256. Commemorating the International Labor Bureau 48th Congress in Paris. Valued at US$3.25 used. Fairly common.

Your gamble surely paid off, revenuecollector! It's always a good surprise when the sellers has not appreciated and described fully what's in a lot. I once gambled on a stockbook with Norwegian stamps were only two of 64 pages were actually presented on ebay. It turned out that those first two pages were probably the least interesting part of the collection, so that purchase was simply a bargain - because the seller did not realize what he/she was sitting on.

The London 'Paid' is nice - also the 'P.D' towards the end. All the red inked items, even red-inked blocks. Yummy! Some wonderful newspaper-cancellations.
Anybody knows what the 'C' cancel in small circle is? (on Bister Napoleon 1st page). Or the peculiar vertical bars on the edges of the 1c grey Liberty allegory (at bottom). All in all there are simply lots of nice stuff - ENVY!

Then I am thinking - what would I do with this material if it was mine - how to organize and display it all in the collection? Think I would probably establish a dedicated cancel collection for France, seperated from the base collection. What's your plan revenuecollector?

Plan? What's that?

The actual on-page display isn't really a big deal, because I don't organize my material for in-person display. I use stockbooks for the majority of things now, as I'm getting away from country collections per se, focusing instead on SOTN cancels worldwide.

The actual "organization" of my material is primarily online, with images and information that are available publicly or privately (all of the where/when/how much paid information).

I will be going through my country collections, pulling the cancel items I want to keep, pulling the better singles and sets to either sell on ebay or send to the APS stamp store.

Speaking of which, at some point I will have a whole bunch of SAFE and Lindner hingeless albums to sell... I shudder to think of how much money I've cumulatively put into hingeless albums. Egads.

Great lot revenuecollector

Thanks for sharing.

Dianne

Revenuecollector - that's an interesting approach for building a collection! I'm also keen on WW SOTN - hope you'll share your stuff on your site one day. Really nice rev material on your site!

btw - as you are focusing on the SOTN cancels, after you have picked the SOTN items from the pages above, do not hesitate to send me all the 'leftovers' ...

Looking at this cover with a circled numeral it is obvious this one isn't an end of year cancel but more likely a Paris bureau.
Other than that this is seriously lovely - drool.

Thanks for the clarification!

And that's one awesome cover! At 14 Fr it seems heavily over-franked - did someone need to ship away his mother-in-law or something?...