Worldwide Bicolor Postmarks

Shown below, from my collection, are two examples of USA bicolor postmarks, that is, postmarks consisting of two distinct colors of ink. If you have examples from your collection, any country, I would enjoy seeing what you have found, as normal postmarks are usually just one color of ink, in your everyday mail.

Linus

This is a receiving cancel, improperly used, from San Jose, California, USA:


This appears to be a dip in the red ink pad followed by a dip in the black ink pad, or vice versa, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA:



*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***

Interesting, I don't recall immediately, of ever seeing such a thing.

Linus,
Why do you believe the San Jose mark is a "receiving" mark?



These are fairly typical of modern self-inking devices or those that fit into round holders - and not the older postmarkers which needed the 3x5 stamp pads. Ask your local clerk to show them to you up-close.

Here is a bi-color I happened to have handy

John,

Businesses use a similar cancelling device to date-stamp their incoming mail, and on another forum, I was told that this cancel was a receiving cancel used improperly. If this is not right, I am open to correction. It is a USPS cancel. My local post office does not have bicolor postmarks. I created this post to learn more about them, thank you for the reply.

Linus

Linus,
You are making me dig deep! I am learning here too. I agree, many businesses use this type of device on their incoming mail. From the "Postal Products Unlimited" catalog dated Spring 1994, here are 2 scans. The first shows a pair of devices intended for received marking. The second a pair with more generic wording available, BUT in bicolor!!! I think the 3rd cancel, N96, is fairly close to what you show - with no indication of "received". My opinion/observation based on this one example is that the San Jose PO regularly uses this "two-color rotary dater" as an origin mark in handling their Express mails. I would hesitate to call it improperly used - especially without seeing an entire cover.





Add: All of the special delivery mail I see handy uses the "time" version as a true "received" mark - and only the philatelic express mail seems to get any received markings at all - and only in 1 color. Perhaps others will have additional relevant bicolor examples

Hmmm. those look like real postmarks to me but I have never seen any like those and I have been through many pounds of US kilo-ware and worked in the mail room at a big corporate office seeing hundreds of envelopes a day. Something like that would have caught my eye immediately, and been on the way to my album.

John,

In my opinion, I think the San Jose postal clerk grabbed his receiving canceller and used it to postmark outgoing mail. This was not the usual postmark for express mail back in the day. I used to soak hundreds of these stamps back in the 1990s and this one was soaked by me, from a clipping, received at an insurance company remittance processing center in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. In my mind, this is the most plausible explanation for this cancel.

Linus

They were used in BOHEMIA and MORAVIA by the Nazis in bi-color of red and blue . I have about three covers with the bi-color cancels in my collection .

Linus, You may be correct, but keep in mind that your cancel is the day-around-the-rim type rather than the 12-hour-clock type, AND does not say "received" in it. It could be used properly for many purposes. One example is not enough to document whether this was a general practice or a one-time-only event at San Jose. There are reasonable arguments for either side.

The main point to my replies is that bicolor marks were available for a variety of postal and non-postal uses. I am still working through the details for the bicolor Philly mark.

Floortrader - I have never seen those before. I opened this thread to discover what others are out there. I knew there had to be others!

John - Point taken. Thanks for adding to this discussion.

Linus

Stamp show postmark, occupied Czechoslovakia. This type of bicolor cancel is seen frequently on Czechoslovakian stamps from the mid 1930's through the German occupation.

Here's another Czechoslovakian bicolor cancel.

Linus pointed me to this thread, so I thought I'd give it a bump. I recently received a bi-color cancel that I think was from the N-96 hand stamp that John Becker posted earlier. The arrow is hard to see against the stamp.

Very nice cancel & stamp combination. We all would love to see cancels like this in our daily mail, instead of messy ink jets, black marker lines, and no cancels at all. I was trying to see the arrow, and I figured it was on the stamp somewhere. What dial number is the arrow pointing to?

Just wondering,

Linus

I will answer my own question. 16. I see it now.