Four Stamps From Canada

Hello. I have two questions again. What is the significance of the letter G in the top two? The bars across the bottom two stamps, are the the cancel marks? Thank you.



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

Top stamps were for 'official' (Government) use, bottom stamps are precancels.
Don

Thank you.

Where and when are these pre-cancellations applied to the stamp?

The reason I ask is that today I noticed I have a Canadian stamp with these sorts of pre-cancel lines, but also with an imperf edge - so a booklet stamp, I believe. Are booklets pre-cancelled?

No booklets were precancelled. Perhaps if you showed a scan of your stamp we could get an understanding of what it is.

Muks

The precancel process was brought into the post office around the late 1880's.

They were provided to large and semi large companies to by pass the normal cancel process to get these letters/bills/statements quicker to the customer (to get money quicker..haha)

This process slowed down around the 1950's and was terminated in the early 1970's.

Now "G" over print replaced O.H.M.S. in 1950's...It was used by Government officials to mail FREE of charge.

Robert.

Here's a scan of my 'booklet' stamp.

Now I look closely, I can see all four edges are cut, not just the sides. Nonetheless, the side margins look big enough that they weren't originally perfed then trimmed back - so does that mean the stamp originated in a booklet?

I can't imagine the cancellation lines were forged - there's no value in the stamp. Any opinions?

Ringo, yours is a coil stamp.
All my precancels have horizontal bars but
they are all sheet stamps.

Maybe when printing coils the bars were applied vertically.

That's even odder then. I presume coil stamps were only available to the public through vending machines. So why would cancelled stamps come out of a vending machine?

Is this a training stamp, perhaps? I've seen similar bars on GB stamps used for Post Office training. They appear absolutely parallel to the sides of the stamp, so I doubt they were applied causally. Probably applied methodically by machine.

Precancels were sometimes used by bulk mailers like advertisers to save the postal service the time of canceling all their stamps individually. I would imagine they used coils in their facilities for ease of operation. I've seen that 6 bar precancel on 160, 179, 205 406 and 407 coils as well.

The way the stamp was separated from it's neighbors indicates it was affixed to the mail item by a mechanical separating/affixing machine. The 3-cent value indicates a third class mailing.

The #3c coil precancel was issued April 1967. They were as mentioned intended for bulk mailers and were available in rolls of 500.