The Overnight Letter Express Delivery Service

Has anybody seen a detail study of the OVERNIGHT LETTER SERVICE . It would be interesting to see research and a write up of this service .
I understand it was started by Western Airline and was called WESTERN AIRLETTER . It was only after it was successful that the Post Office wanted to get involued and demaned ownership and took it over .

Hi; I don't know if this is detailed ,but some info in this link:p.53
https://pnc3.org/Coil_Line_Archives...april-99.pdf

What would you like to know? I've probably one of the largest collections of these items and actually did a series of phone interviews with the gentleman who started the whole Western Airletter concept.

There were four groups in this. Western Airletter, Burlington Air Express, AMEX and P.R.I.D.E., an internal use of the type of mail system.

Here are a few covers for those interested. Note that all of these are commercial uses, not first day covers. These are extremely scarce as almost all of these were used by businesses where no one kept the incoming covers.







This last is the only recorded return to sender cover from the experimental mailing designed to determine the viability of international delivery within time constraints.

Thanks both of you for that information . I picked up a few of those early Western Air stamps and was not sure if they were collectible outside of my Cinderella collection .

A first for me..never seen those before.

Is this helpful?

That reference came out a few years back. I had been working on putting one together and then this popped up. I was a bit upset that it had pictures of items from my collection which could only have been culled from eBay. I stopped working on the one I had planned at that point.

In my interview with Jim Hanifin, we talked about this book. No one seems to know who the writer is. I've tried contacting him and never received a reply. Whoever it was never contacted Jim or anyone Jim knew who was with Western Airletter. The writer remains a mystery. If whomever wrote this happens to read this, please feel free to send me an email. I'd like to talk about the status of some of the material from Western Airletter and see if you have any idea where it has disappeared to or if, unfortunately, it is now lost to us.

It's a good reference (even if they did pirate the images. The only other reference is the original Western Airletter catalogue produced by Jim Hanifin with Western Airletter Centre, along with their bulletins. I have all of those as well. You can find those listed on eBay from time to time.

I would look around for the book you are showing. You should be able to find it being sold for about half what the seller you have shown wants on eBay.

According to the ebay image, the author is one, Robert McKnowie.

Going by the spelling of "specialized", he would be, or it is printed in, the US.
Perhaps you could contact the vendor, he has 4 copies for sale.
He may have some connection to the author.