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Looking BackMore Than 100 YearsThrough Old Publications |
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Looking BackMore Than 100 YearsThrough Old Publications |
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Recently the Board of Directors of the Garfield-Perry Stamp Club in Cleveland, Ohio, was consolidating their 120 years of club archives. While doing so they ran into a scrapbook of cancellation articles that date back to the early part of the 20th century.
William H Schneider was one of the original four members of the club when it was founded in 1890. Sometime in the 1930s he went through a variety of philatelic publications, cut out pertinent cancellation articles dating from 1899 to 1930 and glued them in an old ledger book.
The clippings are from a wide variety of stamps publications with by far the most frequent being Mekeel’s Weekly Stamp News. Other journals include The Weekly Philatelic Gossip, Stamp Herald, Philadelphia Stamp News, The Philatelic Gazette, The Philatelic Journal of America, The Collectors’ Journal, The Collectors’ Journal of Chicago, Philatelic West and The Stamp Collector’s Magazine.
The first clipping is a column by John A Ritchie of New York City from the January 17, 1920 issue of Mekeel’s Weekly Stamp News announcing that this would be the first installment of a series on the systematic study of postmarks and cancellations and asking for the cooperation of readers to submit philatelic material with these markings that can be traced and printed in future editions. He stated that he asked for the materials themselves and not simply tracings so that they can be studied in an organized fashion. Ritchie was apparently a well-regarded stamp collector in that by the February 7 edition he had amassed 48 illustrations of cancels submitted by over 30 collectors including some of the best known in our hobby. These included US Senator Ernest Ackerman, Dr William Evans, John Luff, M Ray Sanborn, John Bartels, Percy Doane, William B Sprague and the Scott Stamp Co. They include many famous cancels including the Kicking Mule, the Hockanum Fox and the Waterbury Running Chicken.
The columns appeared sporadically until the October 23, 1920 issue when it was announced by Mekeel’s that the task outlined by Ritchie had gotten too large for him to continue, and Ritchie suggested that “a membership corporation” known as the “American Cancellation Society, Inc” be formed to continue this work. That apparently did not happen, and the May 12, 1923 issue ran an ad announcing Ritchie had sold his collection. But that was not the end.
On January 4, 1926, H P Atherton, another well-known collector, started a cancellation column entitled “The Forum – United Stamps Issues 1847-70”. This continued until at least early 1930. A few weeks later, Dr William Evans started another column entitled “United States Issues 1870-1900” with many of the same types of illustration shown by the previous two columnists. Dr Evans' column seems to have stopped in early 1928. However, it picked up again in that year in The Weekly Philatelic Gossip as “United States Cancellations” and continued until at least late 1929.
There are probably no new findings in these journals, but it is fun reading through these early attempts to bring to the general hobby the many, many fancy cancellations of the 19th century. So that our membership can have this pleasure as well, this album has been put up on the website. Take some time to read the words of early cancellation collecting.
The journal has been broken down into eleven (11) sections. Each of the sections can be viewed by clicking on the appropriate link. The files are quite large, so be patient.
By the way, the sections are displayed in Adobe PDF format, so you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the pages. You can navigate through the pages with the Arrow Keys on your keyboard. In addition, the documents are searchable.
Download Journal Pages 1 Thru 6
Download Journal Pages 7 Thru 12
Download Journal Pages 13 Thru 18
Download Journal Pages 19 Thru 24
Download Journal Pages 25 Thru 30
Download Journal Pages 31 Thru 36
Download Journal Pages 37 Thru 42
Download Journal Pages 43 Thru 48
Download Journal Pages 49 Thru 54
Download Journal Pages 55 Thru 60
Download Journal Pages 61 Thru 65
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