Date Before Documented First Use Date. Is There Any Value ?

I came across a post car that I was placing in my West Virginia postage history books. I had noticed the rip in the stamp therefore I ignored this card for some time. Noticed the date Jan 28 1912. In my 2006 catalogue the first documented date used is Feb 2 1912. If real , does this post card of any value ?
info of card - Scott# 405 perf 12x12 with a corner rip tied by hand cancel Bays W.Va Jan 28 1912 (JAN is upside down). Bays P.O. was in Nicholas West Virginia and was in service from 1910 to 1958.

Very interesting! A truly new EKU has considerable interest and value, however, you don't state whether the message is also dated or not, so please show us the entire front and back sides. Interpretation of a postal history item necessitates looking at the entire item for other confirming of refuting features.

That said and to think out loud before seeing the rest of the card, the intentional use of an inverted slug very early in the new year is occasionally an indication of the lack of receipt of the new year date. Thus the inverted JAN can mean 1913 use until the 1913 slug arrived, rather than accidental - although this is usually done with the year slug and confirmable by correctly dated receiving marks from other towns apparently from a year later. It is also possible the inverted JAN was used in place of a missing NOV slug. Is this on a Thanksgiving card? Do you have any other mail from this correspondence? Get the idea of a bigger picture?

here is the front and back view of the post card.
I am looking to see if I have anther card with that name.

The front appears to be a Valentine's day card. Valentine's day is February 14. Canfield, West Virginia is just a stone's-throw away from Bays, West Virginia (about 4 miles or less) so the card would have been delivered the same day or maybe as late as the following day. Back then the custom was to have things like Valentine's Day cards delivered either on or the day before Valentine's day so mailing it 17 days before Valentine's Day makes me uneasy as to whether a January 28 date makes sense. I wonder if the date slug in the Bays postmark was just carelessly inserted. Especially since Bays is not even a town but rather a small settlement with very few people living there. I think it would be likely that the post office was one of those run by a single person who likely also had another kind of employment as well. Perhaps out of the back of a store. As such it would have been a stretch for there to be very much mail at all going out from their post office and I wonder of the quality control there was what one might expect from a larger facility. The inverted month slug is one indication of such possible carelessness. This is not absolute proof that this is not what you are hoping it to be, but it raises some substantial questions in my mind.

'
Nice curiosity piece, in any case.

Give it a page, perhaps cutting'n'pasting the (suitably edited) informed comments you read here.

Q/ Can you transcribe the message?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

To me, the card has no appearance of being a Valentine, nor intended to be a Valentine by the date or the message. Good to see both sides, but they draw a blank for me.

To weave some tangential fabric about Bays, WV... from the 1911 "Official Register of the United States", vol 2, the listing of WV postal employees and their compensations, Bays is near the bottom end of the pay scale:



Carriers were making $800-1200 annually, which points to the PM doing this as a side job.

Tangent 2, date-stamp documentation procedures, I believe the postmasters and clerks were generally very careful as they were required to record the setting of the slugs in the cancel with each change. From the 1902 Postal Laws and Regulations (similar text was in the 1913 PL&R which was the next bound compilation volume):





Overall, it seems odd that a small WV village would get a supply of a new stamp nearly a week before it is recorded used anywhere else. Also the lack of a corroborating dated message or receiving mark makes it problematic. I would lean toward this being a 1913 use with the inverted JAN intentionally indicating non-receipt of the new year 1913 date. Perhaps someone can shed light on the official printing/delivery/shipment records of this stamp to help support or refute? A fun mystery!

I read it;

"Hello Bessie how are you this morning
fine I
guess you are having
a fine time going
to meeting
a.. (all?)

It is not a Valentines card.
to meeting

I can't help but interject that all modern US first day covers are postmarked days, or weeks, after the date on the postmark.

The page showing the Bays postmaster getting a salary of $80 supports the likelihood that he or she was doing this as a side job - perhaps in the back of a store that they owned and ran rather than this being a regular post office with highly trained postal workers. As such a bit of carelessness in the regular changing of the post mark device does not sound very unlikely, especially given than the month slug is inverted when according to postal regulations it should be straight and readable.

I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but it also seems to me that a small, out of the way post office in WV was unlikely to get an early shipment of stamps before anyplace else. I realize that an EKU doesn't necessarily mean the very first day it was ever used anywhere, but it still seems unlikely that such a place would be among the first to receive them.