Can Certain Stamps Have Been Released Before Their 'Official' Release Date?

Possible simple answer:

The letter did not arrive in the envelope in question.

The letter arrived earlier and was misplaced into this envelope on a later date.

Possible. The cover was taken from a contemporary letter and the stamp was added.

The distance from the circular dial to the wavy lines varies depending on the make/model of the canceling machine. However each model will be constant across its machines. The two examples provided on the second page are different makes/models than the original cover in question or the added stamp, so of no direct relevance. This said having been an avid student of U.S. machine cancels for well over 30 years.

Seems the consensus answer to the original question is, no way was this stamp released 6 months before its first day of issue.




Then any type of deception is possible.

My question is, why fake a stamp on a cover and letter with matching dates that obviously went through the mail to the intended recipient? I would be more concerned about a faked cancel or addressee.

As someone previously mentioned, if they faked the stamp it was just for appearances.

It is easy to imagine all sorts of scenarios for this, but the one that the stamp was somehow printed and released that far in advance of its release is not one of them, and so in that specific respect this cover is a forgery. One possibility that I think might be a likely one is the letter and envelope are real, but the stamp that was originally on the envelope was removed by someone - likely the prison censor but possibly by most anyone else. Then the person who owned this decided to "improve" it by gluing on a spurious used stamp and inexpertly "doctoring" it up by extending the wavy cancelation markings to make it look complete in their eyes. Why they would do this might be to significantly increase the commercial resale value of a letter that came from such an infamous person. I would not think anyone would do the same to a letter from their "Uncle Bob" who was 'in the slammer for holding up the local 7-11" I have no idea what a real letter from Dahmer might sell for buy my guess is it would be a tidy sum.

We may be approaching this with too critical of a postal historian's eye. I don't read any intentional forgery or fakery conspiracy here. Occam's razor suggests simplicity. At some point there was a stack of peeled-off stamps and a stack of stampless envelopes. An amateur said "Let's put them back on" and some were mismatched - or couldn't be matched. In many ways the stampless cover may more correctly demonstrate how Dahmer's mail was handled.inspected before it got to him, as I noted earlier in this thread contraband can be concealed under a stamp and the reason why embossed envelopes are preferred for such mail.

Just a reminder, the prison population peels off and reuses stamps at a far greater rater than the population outside the prison. So if the stamp was very lightly canceled, it may have been reused.

A plausible theory, but do you have any references to support that idea? I would think that prison mail gets higher scrutiny than ordinary mail. Why would someone already in detention risk committing another crime of postal fraud and and getting more time added to their punishment.

Was the letter contained in the cover coming into jail or going out? If the former, why would it still be contained in the cover to be sent out using a stamp issued many months later peeled off from another cover?

If the letter was going out, how would someone in prison add the stamp when it was already sent?

At times stamps are peeled off by staff to ensure there was nothing hidden under the stamp. Such would open up the need to add a stamp to avoid having the cover look damaged.

Snowphie: sorry for taking so long in clarifying 'my confusion' on the topic. 1. yes sometimes postal clerks will release an issue PRIOR to official release date. The significant time this seems to have happened is to me unexplainable (as you can see from the many opinions offered). I could offer the thought that someone sent it through a cancel machine with the incorrect cancel die but the letter date kind of dismisses that. The issue I was referring to was the SC# 3895 (specifically 3895j valued @37c) issued within a pane 12/30/92. I really should research better but I get lazy, so sorry for thinking maybe your reference was a mix-up of the issues. mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.