How many precancels are there?

 by Phil Cayford

The two basic categories of precancels are bureau precancels and local precancels. Bureau precancels are those which were printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, DC. Local precancels were precancelled in the town where they were used (usually). They are also known as City-Type precancels. Bureau precancels had to be ordered in lots of at least 500,000 sheet stamps or 250,000 coil stamps. Orders for smaller quantities had to be precancelled locally.

Bureau precancels (commonly called “bureaus”) are the easier category to comprehend. There are a finite number of different bureaus, less than 9500, and there are only 24 different styles to master. More importantly, most cities that used bureaus only used an average of 2 or 3 different bureau styles each, so deciphering these is relatively easy. For this reason, most collectors start their precancel collecting with bureaus. Many never progress to locals at all; some because it’s too daunting, some because it’s perceived to be less legitimate (not true), and some just never get there.

Most collectors of bureaus collect single copies of all bureaus. There are not many sub-categories, although some people collect only certain states or certain stamp issues. Advanced bureau collectors can carry their collections to another level by collecting coil pairs in various ways, blocks of four, bureau varieties (breaks, repairs, etc), dateds, plate numbers, or anything one can dream up!

In the total precancel universe, I would guess that there are similar quantities of bureau and local precancels in existence. (My guess? 50,000,000 bureaus and 40,000,000 locals). However, if we’re talking about different precancels, there’s no contest! As stated above, there are about 9500 different bureaus, but there are unknown quantities of different locals; probably 1.5-2.0 million different! More than 20,000 different towns and more than 40,000 different types. There are numerous sub-categories of local precancels, which is what makes them so interesting. One can collect them in endless different ways. If one gets bogged down with finding no more new items for a certain collection, just start a new way of collecting them! Among the more popular categories are: towns, types, double-line electros, city-type coils, Bi-cents, classics, general, dateds, integrals, etc. There are two basic kinds of locals: handstamped and printed (using a printing press or mimeograph machine).