Prexies

John Paul, Most coil precancel are done at the Bureau of Engraving, made to order for the local PO. But there are some locally produced but with machine and plate device to print with were through the USPO. In all, only 72 cities ever used coils, there are 120 types(different overprints) and 2399 different stamp items.
Notice your coils, in the first post, are two big cities New York & Philadelphia.
In the second post, the middle top in Kansas City, MO, & Rahway is a real city in NJ. The middle bottom is not a precancel, just a well centered cancel.

Mike

G'Day John "GPO" is either Government Post Office or General Post Office,I'm not sure how it's used in your part of the world but here in Aus it's the General Post office and refers to the main city post office or central post office,some one will jump in if I'm wrong

Warrehouse: thanks for the info on precanceling coils. Also you are dead on with the GPO cancel - with the centering and the vertical lines, I just assumed it was a precancel, but clearly it wasn't.

John Paul

You very welcome!, John Paul

how can you tell if they are precancels?

Tina, If you go back to the end of page 4, of this tread posted by John Paul are the easiest to see, only the one with the GPO cancel is not a precancel.
You'll see that the city and state are overprinted bewteen 2 lines on these
stamps. These are the common types there are others.

Mike

Sorry John Paul I thought you asked what it was and wasn't thinking that it didn't belong among the precancels.
regards
Harry

Nice sets everyone! I've attached scans of my "main" prexie collection. Since this series was such a long running set the color variations are rather large. I have another 21 pages (not pictured) of mostly shade variations.

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Image: prexie2.jpg
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mike so the black ink means pre-cancel? I thought that a pre-cancel was a stamp that has been postmarked but not really sent unused with postmark please explain to me alittle more im confused also C.T.O whats the difference in the 2?

No, black ink does not mean pre-cancel. Although in general, most pre-cancels are done in black ink, there are exceptions.

Pre-cancel just means that the stamps are already cancelled but are still valid for postage (subject to a lot of restrictions, and you do have to have a permit to use them). Historically, they are usually used by large-volume mailers to expedite the mailing process.



CTO is an acronym meaning Canceled To Order. The stamps are also cancelled prior to sale, but are NOT valid for postage as they were intended for collectors. From the government's perspective, CTOs are revenue generators without the service liability of those stamps actually being used to mail something.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia article on CTO's, Tina.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancelled-to-order

it is sometimes very difficult to tell if a stamps is a CTO or no, but sometimes it is blatantly obvious. If the cancel is just too well centered and too neatly placed and from a country known for their CTOs then it probably is.

Tina, NO Black ink by itself, but again, if you go back to John Paul's post at the end of page 4, if you see stamps like that they are likely precancels.
They were princibly design to expedite the mail by bypassing the canceling process for large mailings.

What are prexies?

Prexies is the nickname for the Presidential Issue of the US that began around 1938. The pictures you see are all stamps from that series of definitives.

With all the nice prexie collections shown, I'd like to add just two $1 stamps I have. What I have not been able to determine is whether or not the used one is the 1954 reprint w/USIR watermark. I have dipped it and can see no clear watermark. The color is vastly different than the mint #832 on the left.


Marty