United States Circular Date Cancels

I collect used U.S. stamps. I've tried to acquire nicely centered copies with clean, well-placed circular date cancellations (and, for earlier material, I have also collected show cancellations—see the Panama-Pacific photo). I upgrade for early-dated cancellations that are not too dark, and I especially appreciate strikes that clearly show the town and date without obscuring the design.

My question is: what are the options for modern spray cancellations? I can sometimes obtain handstamps, but it seems nearly impossible to get everything canceled that way—especially since fewer people drop letters at the counter anymore.

Modern spray-on inkjet cancellations often seem very uninspiring to me. They can be heavy, smeared, or look like little more than a smudge. They frequently obscure the stamp design in an unattractive way and lack the character of earlier circular date stamps or even classic machine cancels with recognizable patterns.

I'm curious how other collectors approach this problem. Do you try to find light, well-positioned spray cancels as the best realistic option? Do you focus more on commercial covers instead of off-paper singles? Are there reliable strategies for increasing the chances of getting readable, lightly struck modern cancellations?

I've included pages from my collection for inspiration and would welcome any suggestions.

Thanks for sharing some of your collection. I love socked-on-the-nose cancels and seeing full album pages with SONs is quite pleasing.

As for modern cancels, I also find spray cancellations annoying. It does seem to me that larger, non machinable envelopes and parcels are more likely to get traditional stamped cancellations. Anything I've been sent in a Manila envelope has gotten hand stamped cancellations.

These cancels appear to be "advertising" the PPIE cancels. Actual PPIE cancels would be "Model Post Office" cancels. A nice set and at a fraction of the price for PPIE Model Post Office S-O-Ns.

For mailings, I often have the clerk at the PO hand cancel the stamps, which is a circular dated cancel. You may be able to send stamped envelopes to friends, and have them return them to you.

My SOTN album ends in 2002 so I don't try to be a completist and obtain every single stamp issue after that point. Plus the self-adhesive era makes it difficult and messy to mount stamps on-piece in an album. Instead, for the modern issues I just keep them in stock books, some sorted by stamp design, some sorted by cancellation type.

I do like some of the pictorial spray-on cancels in their early stages before the ink clogs up or whatever happens to make them smudgy and unreadable.




Parcelpostguy is right, the Panama Pacific slogan cancels were used to advertise the upcoming expo. They can be found at least as early as 1911, but finding them on the PPIE stamps is especially nice. The size of the stamp seems designed to fit the exact size of the cancel.