Why So Many Like Covers?

Good day everyone! The stamps pictured came with a stamp lot purchased from an estate. Please pardon my ignorance dealing with covers. I want to understand why someone would collect the various covers shown in the volume that they did. Every cover is addressed to Capital Mutual Association Jefferson City, Missouri. Thank you kindly, Jonathan

Not really "collected" in the sense of "sought out". Someone at the company probably saved the covers for the stamps, either for themselves or for a friend.

First off, I see all different stamps of the late 1940 and early 1950s being used. There are obviously many different city cancels and at least a couple of different cancel types. Not a specialist collection for sure, but a collector can collect whatever they like.

Like for any company receiving tons of correspondence at the time, these envelopes were basically discarded and saved by some collector. This was likely part of a much bigger hoard; I've seen several from other companies. While not of much value, these are still of interest as genuine non-philatelic usages.

A great source of postal history for the variety of hand cancels, machine cancels and unusual uses.

Good morning stampavalanche and all,

A good friend of mine years ago picked up the envelopes from the local utility company soaking (back when you could do that) stamps which he sold in bundles of one-hundred and saving those envelopes postmarked at smaller towns (back when most small towns had post offices) as part of his retirement hobby. He did this from the late 1950's into the early 1970's.

Looks like you have a small section of Missouri cancels. Why not sort them by town and see how many now closed post offices are represented?

Enjoy our hobby.

As postal history source, they are great. Storage and display are the downside with the #10 and larger envelopes.

Around 25 years ago I purchased a similar hoard with some 35,000 of this type of envelope, all sent to 5-6 different oil companies in Houston Texas, and dated between 1955 and 1966. These were the regular remittance envelopes for credit card payments (slightly larger than the normal No. 6 envelope), and someone apparently had contacts at all the companies and went by them regularly and picked up what must have been several garbage bags or boxes of covers from each one on each visit. There were gaps in the dates that indicated this was done more on a monthly rather than a weekly basis.

The hoard had already been picked over and filtered (probably several times ): most covers with commemoratives were gone (a shame), and there were no covers from the large towns (a good deal).

The remainder was essentially all small Texas towns, and I ended up with close to 2,000 different postmarks, both machines and hand cancels. Fortunately, one of the previous "owners" had sorted all the covers alphabetically by post office, which made my examination and selection relatively painless.

There was a nice variety in markings which showed the transition between the presence of no ZIP Code and ZIP Code in the cancels which occurred towards the end of the date range. It added significantly to my collection of 20th century Texas cancels, and I've had to be VERY careful ever since to not blindly buy covers from Texas between those dates.

The residual covers are still stuck in the back of a closet. Anyone want a Winter project?

The most amusing part, which has nothing do to with philately, is that the individual who sold them to me apparently worked at a funeral home. All the covers were packed in boxes which had originally contained embalming fluid. The questioning look on the face of the driver of the UPS truck who delivered the 13 cartons to my door was priceless.

I've done this on several other occasions also, with different addressee's, different date periods. It's a terrific way to build a detailed reference collection. The main problem is simply managing the volume and documenting the information for the philatelic community.

Mike

They were probably saved originally by a collector who worked for the company, or by a collector child whose parent worked for the company.

revcollector:

If they were from only a single company, I'd agree with you. But with the multiple companies involved, it seems more like an outside collector. Although he could have been an employee at one company with contacts with his equivalent position at the other companies.

I've had several people identified (but never confirmed) as the original collector - all now deceased, so it's probably going to remain a mystery.

Mike

The business office of a large company/corporation is a treasure trove for collectors. Back in 1965 I worked as the mail clerk for FS Webster in Cambridge MA. They made typewriter ribbons, carbon papers, printed letterhead stationary & other business related items. The morning mails were opened by myself & the Company President's Secretary (for those personal & confidential & eyes only mails). One day in the mix there was a FDC for a recently issued stamp, with cache. I made it known that I was a beginner collector, she brought the mail piece to the Company President, 5-minutes later I had my 2nd FDC. Thank you Mr. Bigelow.

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Domestic cover hoards are good for the reasons cited above.

I enjoy international cover hoards; most are from banks, but I've also seen international batches from (for example) the Tulsa Oil & Gas Journal, Dun & Bradstreet, university admissions offices, etc.

Back in the day, a polite request to someone who worked at a large office would lead to a polite request to someone in the mail room (or the mail-opening secretaries) and, wow, you could be as happy as a pig in slop. One assumes that grown-ups would send a bottle (or whatever) the other way at Xmas time, while the boy scouts got away with a shy grin.

I enjoy the international covers because they sometimes carry those stamps that we ass-u-me were only CTO and never GPU (Genuinely Postally Used).

Exhibiting: At recent AAPE meetings, the subject of displaying #10 covers was addressed. Nobody likes the severely-angled-on-letter-size-paper (8-1/2 by 11) 'solution'. Instead, if you can work the sequencing, use a double-sized (11 by 17) sheet in the center of the frame.

(An alternative, having the #10 cover 'bleed' from one letter-size-page onto an adjacent letter-size-page, only works if you are setting-up the exhibit yourself; asking a third party to mount an exhibit this way would be a little much.)

Storing: I am putting my new Africans into BCW Pocket pages, myself:

https://www.bcwsupplies.com/pro-2-p...e-100-ct-box

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Nice link! Thanks Ikey.

I have a worldwide hoard similar to this all sent to a bank.