The Windsor County Clerk's Office cancels come in two known varieties, one with J. R. Pember as the Clerk and Karl A. Pember as the Deputy Clerk. These stamps have passed through the collections of some of the better known US revenue collectors, but without much explanation as to why they exist, or what type of cancels they might be.
I acquired the J. R. Pember stamp immediately below from the collection of Henry Tolman. He had squirreled it away at the back of his his 1898 proprietary printed cancels binder, among the "miscellaneous" cancels in his collection. The stamp was the only documentary stamp among the thousands of proprietaries. It is not clear why he might have placed it there; he might have had no other place that made sense to mount it. There is no clean explanation as to why public officials like the Pembers might have printed cancels, and even less clear as to why they would have done so with one cent documentary stamps.
Based on what we do know, which includes the lack of need for printed quantities of the these documentary stamps, and the existence of the Elgin National Watch cancels, I am inclined to believe that these cancels were made with a similar device to the Elgin cancels.
The Pembers would have had a reason to create an authorizing stamp of some sort as County Clerks, which would have been a single stamp primarily for use on documents. My guess is these cancels were made by a similar device to that used by Elgin, and they used the stamps to "cancel" these documentary revenue stamps after the stamps were placed on a document. They might have been used legitimately, they may have been philatelically inspired. We'll need an actual stamp on document to know.
The upshot of this theory is that these are not precancels, printed or otherwise. In a revised list of documentary printed precancels, I would place them in the back with cancels that appear printed, like those of Elgin, but provide that further evidence might show them to be actual precancels.
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