New Post Office Publications Resources On Stamp Smarter

Over the past decade, I have researched and recorded information about Post Office Department publications that were available on the Internet and useful to postal historians who wanted to understand how the Post Office Department operated to move the mails. I've always referred to these compiled collection of Publication names and their URLs as "Portals".

A revised version of these Portals have now been added to the Stamp Smarter website, located there under the title Portals to Postal History. http://stampsmarter.com/Learning/PostalPortal.html

I have updated most of these Portals with new resources, and added a couple which were not on the original site.

I'll also mention again that there is an almost complete set of the Official Postal Guides available here for downloading. I had first announced the availability of these this past fall, and since that time, we have edited the entire set of these PDF files so that the pages are in a one-up page format rather than the original two-up age format, and with this change, we were able to greatly improve the OCR recognition rate, so that the resulting files are searchable.

These PDF files include both the annual volumes, and all the monthly and quarterly supplements, most of which are not available elsewhere in the digital libraries on the Internet.

There are about 180 PDF files in this set of Official Postal Guides.

We have also added some other Post Office publications to the Stamp Smarter Library page for US Post Office Publications. There is a PDF copy of the Postmaster General's Ledger that recorded all postmaster appointments made between 1792 and 1818, with some enhancements which make it easier to use that the version on the NARA website, and I have compiled a Finding Aid that makes it easier to locate specific post offices in the PDF. That Finding aid can be downloaded from a link on frame 4 of that PDF.

There is also a digitized set of the Stamp Bill Books posted here. These ledgers record the number of stamps shipped to the Post Office by contractors during the years 1870-1897. These are slightly easier to use as I have added PDF bookmarks to help navigate the pages.

I encourage everyone to look at this page of Post Office resources, and would welcome suggestions to other USPOD resources that we could add there to facilitate future postal historians

Mike

Thanks, Mike. Wonderful research asset.