A Printed Cancelation On The Swift & Courtny And Beecher & Co, Ro174c.

This stamp is an unusual find from ebay showing a magenta overprint on the RO174c. The overprint is vertical facing the right showing "AUG !" on the first line "1877" on the second line and "S & C" on the third line. The only previous printed cancels have seen on Match Stamps have been in black or red (except the varieties on RO11). Does anybody else have this stamp with this overprint? Christopher West makes no mention of this stamp having any overprint.

I see the same cancel on a number of mine. For example, one can see it on this RO174d.

After accidentally selling JoNo the RO174c , I checked mine and I have RO174s with overprints on all of the paper types (b, c, and d). I can't make out the dates on all of them though. Given the paper types it does suggest that the overprint was used for a long time.?

The use of the word "overprint" confuses me. Are not these faint markings cancellations? I am quite aware that the cancellation of the private die proprietary stamps was not required, but Swift & Courtney was not the only firm that applied cancellations.

Yes that makes sense. In this case the additional printing was to prevent reuse.

So would overprint be the appropriate term when the intent was to "change" the stamp, such as the "HFM" printing on the RS95 and RS118?

I've also seen h/s (hand stamp?). This would seem to imply how it was applied, not why.

Cancels on M&M's were often used as an accounting tool. This company went from being Swift & Courtney (S&C) to being Swift, Courtney, and Beecher around 1875; the cancel might have something to do with that process, even as late as 1877. This company was the largest of the "combine" that later joined together about 1880 to form Diamond Match Co.

They may have been experimenting with stock rotation by taking old stock (identified by date) off the shelves. For instance we see that in the twentieth century with cigarettes. There is a one frame exhibit of federal cigarette stamps with coded, dated cancels illustrating that. Walter Raleigh's exhibit will be in the Court of Honor at the stamp show in Omaha next weekend.

By the way HFM is a Herrick cancel and I rather suspect that the motivation again was stock rotation. Or in the case of RS95, Hall & Ruckel was in the wholesale drug business and they applied their private die stamp on Herrick's product and identified it as such with the HFM cancel.

Hall & Ruckel stamps are also known with X Bazin cancels for the reason revenuermd mentioned in the previous post. In 1878, they became the sole marketing agent for X. Bazin products and their private die stamps had the X Bazin cancel applied for use on these products. Interestingly enough, in the case of X. Bazin, a rectangle of ink hiding the H&R was also applied. I've seen it referred to as an overprint but I typically still call it a cancel. Maybe overprint is the correct term though since the intent wasn't to cancel the stamp but to indicate it's use on another manufacturers product?




It appears sometimes they obliterated the H&R but failed to add the XB indicating it may have been a 2 step process.