You like the tied seals - I like the embossed post card
Very nice find, David.
Three different aspects to appreciate
I learn something new each day it seems. Lovely card!
Big City Cancel............Once upon a time in a land not so far away, Antonio was at my house looking at covers. I had a shoebox of Minneapolis covers. Antonio convinced me that I needed to make an exhibit or collection out of the mess. I did. It was fun, fascinating and I learned a lot from the big city cancels. It is now in three volumes and covers Minneapolis from territorial times to the present with uses, rates, advertising, cancel types and even goes into meters and philatelic uses. I have shown it to the Collectors Club in Minnesota and it was received quite well.
I am now working on St. Paul, Minnesota. So don't discount the seemingly common stuff from the big city. When you start to organize it into a collection there will be stories to be told.
I also have been throwing New York city station cancels into a large box that I need to get organized. There are so many different stations and you don't get much bigger than New York city. I need to find a good list of all the stations. When I do I will likely find out that I am missing a ton.
It's always interesting finding covers that you know will appeal to multiple audiences, and this is one of those, with its Minneapolis slogan cancel AND nicely tied Christmas seals.
It's an embossed secular New Year's card, mailed December 28, 1922, within the city of Minneapolis. It has a what I take to be common slogan machine cancel: "Register or Insure Valuable Mail"
I show it here for Antonio and Tim, neither of whom is likely to be overly impressed with the big city cancel. I bought it for the two tied seals. We don't often see multiples used, so it's a touch out of the ordinary.
My friend George Painter maintains a census of seal usage, and the 1922 seal is among the more popular ones and also one of the last to be popular, or at least as documented among the tied seals.
Hmmmm. Why would that be. I'll give you a second to mull it over. Give up?
America, like most of the belligerents in the First World War, amassed enormous debt. We paid some of it by increasing postage rates by a penny for both first class letters AND post cards during the war, reducing them to pre-war amounts in 1919. Remember that the USPOD was a cabinet-level organization and part of the federal government. Today, it's full of expensive unfunded government mandates and directives and government oversight and regulation, but, at least in name, it's independent.
But in the mid-20s, its revenue and expense streams were tied directly to the federal government. So, Congress, in 1924, authorized the USPOD to increase post card fees from 1c to 2c, and this spelled the doom of post cards (letters and postal cards were unchanged). Now you're asking yourself, why do dying post cards have anything to do with seals. Because post cards were the primary way that Christmas greetings were sent and Christmas time was the focus of the seals. It is very rare to see Christmas seals on any envelopes from the seal's inception in the US, in 1907, until this change in rates in 1924. This change had the effect of making post cards and letters the same fee, and since people could write so much more in a letter than in a post card with all its epistolary restrictions, well.... The experiment was abandoned in 1926, but the damage had been done and post cards had fallen out of favor and seal usage plummeted, dropping, in our non-exhaustive census, from 287 in 1922 to 215 in 1924, and plummeting thereafter, never to reach 200 again. This survey is being conducted now, so it's a measurement of scale, meaning it can never capture what happened but rather its shape as so much has been lost to time, damage, etc. It is further compromised by its approach, which relies on observations of seals offered in online auctions and by voluntary reports of collectors.
Finally, I wonder if the senders, Gus and Amelia, sent only this card to the Bares, or did they also send a Christmas card? Were either family, or both, secular, atheistic, agnostic, or some non-Christian religion or a sect that avoided graphic representations of religious images?
David
re: Minnesota PPC with Tied Seals
You like the tied seals - I like the embossed post card
Very nice find, David.
re: Minnesota PPC with Tied Seals
Three different aspects to appreciate
re: Minnesota PPC with Tied Seals
I learn something new each day it seems. Lovely card!
re: Minnesota PPC with Tied Seals
Big City Cancel............Once upon a time in a land not so far away, Antonio was at my house looking at covers. I had a shoebox of Minneapolis covers. Antonio convinced me that I needed to make an exhibit or collection out of the mess. I did. It was fun, fascinating and I learned a lot from the big city cancels. It is now in three volumes and covers Minneapolis from territorial times to the present with uses, rates, advertising, cancel types and even goes into meters and philatelic uses. I have shown it to the Collectors Club in Minnesota and it was received quite well.
I am now working on St. Paul, Minnesota. So don't discount the seemingly common stuff from the big city. When you start to organize it into a collection there will be stories to be told.
I also have been throwing New York city station cancels into a large box that I need to get organized. There are so many different stations and you don't get much bigger than New York city. I need to find a good list of all the stations. When I do I will likely find out that I am missing a ton.