USA - precanceled postage due?

Yes, they're pretty easy to find.  They were used as a form of accounting for the post office - let's say you were a business and you offered your customers business reply envelopes (they stick it in the post box without affixing a stamp, and it's up to the business receiving the envelope to pay).  When you paid, you would get precancelled postage dues as your proof of purchase.  On this kind of use it must have been common to just hand over part sheets of stamps without affixing them to anything - you see quite a few with full gum on the back.

Or, alternately I suppose the PO could affix precancelled stamps as required on individual pieces of mail with short postage and then they wouldn't need to be cancelled separately.

Virtually all of them need the Town and Type catalogue if you want to assign catalogue numbers to them - I think there are only a very few of them that were Bureau precancelled.  The Precancel Stamp Society website says precancels were no longer used on postage dues after 1934.

I dug through a couple of handfuls and found these.



Ryan