Quote:
Originally Posted by rhettyeakley
I think the guy is completely making these and not even bothering to find real stamped FDC's as both examples have the same date and time stamp 9 am on them. Looks like he has had a few rubber stamps made to help him on his way.
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Nope, no need to do that. The cancelling of the first day covers even back then was done a few different ways. The baseball centannial was a popular stamp. The official count of first day covers was 398,199. The majority of those were done my mail in orders, you'd send an envelope and money to cover the stamps to the official first day post office in advance. Once they'd made them they went in the mail. Most of those were done on the standard cancelling machine, or in the case of Cooperstown probably a few machines brought there for the day by the POD. Each machine could handle several thousand envelopes an hour. And since they were souvenirs the PO wasn't always good about changing the time since they had to do it manually.
The more interesting first day covers are the ones with odd rates like two stamps to make airmail, or odd size envelops which had to be cancelled by hand. People getting theirs at the ceremony itself would have also had a bigger chance of getting a hand cancel.
Another thing that was and still is done is making FDCs from unofficial towns. People would buy stamps then get them cancelled in the next town, or some other nearby town. One dealer made an amazing effort to get some from unofficial towns with names related to the subject of the stamp. sometimes that meant an early morning purchase and a long train ride.
Single stamps and plate blocks were popular choices. Normal blocks of 4 were not unusual.
Addressed first day covers with no cachet can be had very affordably. Usually between $10 and 15.
with some printers the ink won't cover or won't stick to the black ink of the cancel. So it's easy to print a cachet and make it look like it was under the cancel.
Add on cachets are becoming common, some are decent quality, some not as good, even the hand painted ones. Some of the nice ones are collectable as art, as long as they're advertised as add-ons. (These aren't all that well done, I'd probably be less interested in them than a blank FDC.)
More modern FDCs are even cheaper. Nearly all of the addressed uncacheted ones are the sort of thing most dealers would sell for $1 or less. I passed up a batch of maybe 10 thousand for $500. The dealer had them for sale individually at a quarter each.
Steve B
06-18-2013, 05:21 PM
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