Manuscript Cancellation Reference Books

Does anyone know of any good Manuscript cancellation books listing the towns/cities which used handwritten city/date etc cancels etc.

Thanks

For the most part manuscripts are going to be found in the catalogs for the comparatively few states that have comprehensive catalogs (North Carolina, Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska, etc.). Manuscripts are historically understudied, and/or just too widespread to easily get arms around.

Volume 1 of The American Stampless Cover Catalog had a section in each state listing towns from which manuscript cancellations were recorded. The last printed edition of this book was a few decades ago. You can download it from the U.S. Philatelic Classics Society (www.uspcs.org) website. Obviously, this book only recorded covers without stamps.

We are in the process of building off of the ASCC and turning it into the American Postal Markings Catalog which will cover all postmarks and other markings (not cancellations) on covers until June 30, 1861. The work will be online, searchable, with images, sortable, saveable, printable, and able to take submissions from the public. Project is about 90% complete. Just finishing up the workflow engine for external submissions.

More on this coming soon.

That's an impressive undertaking. Good luck getting it across the finish line.

Agreed. I definitely look forward to this.

Someone might be able to be more helpful if the original poster would be more specific as to his interest.

What state or region is of interest?

As paperhistory noted, there are some compilations of this type available. Virtually all are based on a state or county and not US in general.

The following link is to a project I started a while back. It is incomplete and some links are broken, but it might have some useful information. Although identified as a Stamp Smarter project, it is not currently available from the Stamp Smarter website as it is still "under development".

https://stampsmarter.org/Learning/LinksPortal.html
Mike

Thank you "ALL" for great links and helps. Lastly, someone asked for a sample to help focus the answers.