1898 Revenues: A Collector's Guide to 1898 Documentary Printed Precancels: American Express Printed Precancels with Precancel Handstamps

These cancels are somewhat unusual. All the stamps below have the normal AMEX printed precancels. But all of them also have handstamps intended to make the year date current. It seems that one or more AMEX offices applied handstamp precancels, using a purplish magent ink to add a partial or full year date. We don't know for sure, but I figure it likely that this process was applied across several AMEX offices while the "189_" year date was used in the printed cancel. All the stamps below are of the "189_" variety save for the last stamp which has a printed cancel with a 1900, plus the 1900 handstamp.

Richard Fullerton included most of these handstamps in his list of printed cancels; I'll indicate the non-Fullerton items below. Fullerton was a precancel collector, was a member of the Precancel Stamp Society, and wrote an article on these revenue precancels for a special edition of Linn's Stamp News. My guess is that Fullerton included these items in his list of printed cancels as the handstamps were also precancels, like the printed portion of the cancel. Additionally, the most significant revenue collector of the era, and perhaps ever, Morton Dean Joyce, collected these handstamps. They were well represented in his stockbook of the Fullerton listed items.

The stamp above is presented as an example that helps demonstrate that the handstamps were applied as precancels. The stamp below is a Type 2 189_ hyphen-hole, which is a scarce stamp (the HH version of the 189_ cancel is somewhat rare). But the stamp also has a 1900 handstamp immediately below the 189_ date, and the bottom of a 1900 handstamp at the top of the stamp that had been applied to the stamp above when the stamps were still part of an intact sheet or multiple.

Below are nine collectible types of these handstamp cancels. Six were listed by Richard Fullerton. The three unlisted items were in Joyce's collection of these items. Several of these examples came from the Henry Tolman collection in the Siegel sale in 2007.