Creating A 21st Century Collector's Guide to 1898 Documentary Printed Precancels -- or -- Updating and Revising the Fullerton List

For the next few posts, I'll take a break from exploring companies and their 1898 printed cancels. I will soon get back to those as there are many more companies to unpack.   Instead, the focus will be on a path forward, and an exploration of the work of philatelists to document these cancels.

Railroads featured in the corners of Fullerton's original 1952 cover:

Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha Railway; Sioux City & Pacific Railroad;

St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railway; Missoui Pacific Railway

More than 10 years ago on this site I began an attempt to update and reorganize Richard Fullerton's early-1950s Catalog of Railroad Company, Street Railway and Express Company Printed Cancellations.  The catalog, which amounts to a small, 12-page pamphlet before a short addendum was added about a year or so after its initial publication, provides a checklist for battleship revenue collectors pursuing a narrow niche of the hobby by collecting printed precancels on 1898 series  documentary revenue stamps.  My earlier attempt at a new list was online only, and uninformed by additional years of experience, learning, new material that has been added to my collection, and peaks at the collections of other collectors.

It is my intention to publish a new list, with new stamps, new cancels, and new companies.  Color images of the cancels on actual stamps will feature.  And the list will not be confined to railroads and express companies.  A life insurance company will be added, in addition to several pharmaceutical companies that in addition to proprietary printed cancels, also used printed cancels on documentary battleships.

For veteran 1898 collectors, printed cancels on battleships are mostly known on the proprietary series,with 100s of legitimate pharmaceutical companies and fraudsters and snake oil salesman alike overprinting the tax stamps that would be applied to the boxes or bottles of their nostrums.  The documentary series would primarily receive printed precancellations from railroads, hence Mr. Fullerton's emphasis on railroad companies in his title.  But companies other than railroads are known to have used printed precancels

I figure a revision of Fullerton's list should offer a new perspective on these cancels and the underlying stamps, a significant amount of new information, and a streamlining of the many subvarieties listed by Fullerton.  Here are a few of the areas to be explored and added:

Discussion:  Some narrative explanations are due for a list of this sort.  Fullerton provided little explanatory information; his work is a list and not much else, save for 1) a couple of pages railroad histories based on the 1874 and 1888 editions of Poor's Manual and the recollections of noted revenue collector Henry Tolman, and 2) a forward including acknowledgements and a half page of parameters, including the stamps cancelled and the color of the cancels.  The collector is left with little to understand why items are included or missing from the list, and even clarity regarding how cancels were assigned types, resulting, for example, in years of confusion for many collectors in the types of the Chicago & North Western Railway.  Typeset cancels dominate the field, but mimeographic and electrotype cancels can also be found (Fullerton included no electrotypes in his list); there is a need for a discussion of these printing technologies as even Fullerton included examples of mimeography in the case of four cancels listed on the 2 cent battleship for Adams Express.  The E. S. Wells R164 block of four above is the one of the rare known examples of electrotyping.

Reorganization: Richard Fullerton and two other philatelists in the mid-20th century independently worked on a project to list the railroad printed precancels.  The first was Clarence Chappell, who published a list in the February 7, 1942 edition of the Weekly Philatelic Gossip.  The second was Charles Metz, who seemed to labor in the same years as Chappell on the list, and though I have no confirmation, would seem to have been in competition with Mr. Fullerton.  Metz began publishing his work in 1948 in the Chambers Stamp Journal (reprinted in The American Revenuer in September 48), and again in November 1951 in Chambers.  All three men organized their lists the same way:  alphabetically.  Woops.  While at the surface level alphebetization seems logical, it limits an understanding of the cancels with regards to their production and administration.  It turns out that only a small group of railroad managements ordered the production and use of printed precancels; the relationship between these railroads, their managements, and the existence of the known cancels, and the possible existence of cancels to still be discovered, relies on understanding the business relatationships in the railroad business during the 1898 tax period.

Addition of New Companies, Cancels, and Business Categories:  At least one railroad is missing from Fullerton's list, and there may be three.  A 2 cent R155 has been identified with a railroad printed cancel.  And an insurance company, the Provident Savings Life Assurance Society, used printed cancels across a range of documentaries, including the 40 and 80 cent battleships and three different dollar values.  At least one investment bank and several pharmaceutical companies are also confirmed to have used printed cancels on documentary stamps, like the E. S. Wells example above.  

Simpler Assignment of Types:  Some of the railroad listings could benefit from consolidation.  I'll go into detail when the real discussion starts, but for an example, there are really only two cancel types for the Chicago & North Western Railway, even if Mr. Fullerton assigned five types.  These two types are characterized by the existence or nonexistence of a period after the N in the cancels; Fullerton figured that different dates (all four of the C&NW system railroads dated their cancels) should receive their own type delineation in addition to the presence of a period.  At left are examples of cancels with no dates but with and without a period.  Clarence Chappell's more substantial list of proprietary printed 1898 cancels did not assign a new type on the basis of date; a new listing should follow that protocol.  

Disinclusion of Minor Subtypes:  Fullerton lists many varieties that are ambiguous, and subject to the interpretation of collectors.  Some examples include cancel varieties that have a "smeared period", missing periods, or commas instead of periods.  A new list should consider how many of these varieties should really be considered collectible, and whether or not they should be given a prominent listing.  There is evidence that the listing by Fullerton of many of these varieties was driven by the collection of Morton Dean Joyce based on the notes in Joyce's stockbook of documentary printed cancels.

Scarcity:  Nearly all of the known documentary printed cancels are scarce, with some types only known with one or a small number of examples.  An assessment of the relative scarcity of these cancels would be useful to the collector that wishes to acquire a significant number of these cancels.  Richard Friedberg's 1995 Linn's article provides a scarcity rating model on a scale from 1 to 5.  The Missouri Pacific Railway cancel to the right is one of the most common cancels, with a scarcity rating of 1.

Bibliography:  A new list should include a reasonably comprehensive bibliography.  Richard Fullerton provided brief acknowledgements up front, but didn't provide collectors with reference material to understand how the knowledge base had been built of these types of cancels.  

Red Herrings and the Unconfirmed:  There are a few cancels out there that just might fool a collector into thinking they are looking at a printed precancel.  The Elgin National Watch Company cancel to the left is just one of them.  The list should include these cancels and other known "red herrings" that look like, but are clearly not, contemporaneous printed precancels.  A new list should also include the ambiguous cancels:  cancels that look like they could be printed but for which there is no unambiguous information confirming the cancels might have been applied by hand or before placing on a document, or, in some cases, philatelically inspired or manufactured.