MODERN U.S. MAIL A series of columns published in Linn’s Stamp News Part 3: Jan 10, 2011 – Dec 9, 2013 Columns written by Tony Wawrukiewicz Extracted or scanned and compiled into these consolidated files by Mike Ludeman 2017 Note: Copyright to these articles is owned by the author. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 7 ***** 2011 ***** 7 7 [Jan 10] Two different ways of handling shortpaid special delivery mail 7 [Feb 14] Project to digitize the US 'Postal Bulletin' moves ahead slowly 9 [Mar 14] Star Route Markings leads to information about US mail contract delivery service 12 [Apr 11] How to identify U.S. transient second-class mail paid stamps 14 [May 9] Commerical Base and Commercial Plus Priority Mail rates and labels 15 [June 13] International surface parcel post rate examples remain elusive 17 [July 11] Material for Planting from commercial mailers 18 [Aug 8] Changes to regulations for handling shortpaid mail 19 [Sept 12] Regulations for handling registered mail found in ordinary mail 20 [Oct 10] Form 3858 used for Registered Mail undeliverable as adressed 21 [Nov 14] The only one known: undeliverable-as-addressed fourth-class mail 22 [Dec 12] Prepayment rules for Certified Official Mail vary over time 23 25 25 ***** 2012 ***** 25 25 [Jan 9] Calculating rates of mail for dispatch outside of mail bags 25 [Feb 6] NO COLUMN PUBLISHED 25 [Mar 5] New rates online; the development of Commercial Base rates 27 [Apr 9] Early certificates of mailing did the job without the name 29 [May 14] Forwarded international mail can be challenging to find 31 [June 11] US 'Postal Bulletin' 1880-1971, now digital and online 32 [July 9] Rarities emerge from transition of unmailable private cards 34 [Aug 13] Customs and delivery fees led to interesting postal markings 36 [Sept 10] Complex rules covered shortpaid post-1966 international mail 38 [Oct 8] Liberty Series franking discovered on early Priority Mail 41 [Nov 12] 1961 8c Pershing finally loses its orphaned, ambiguous status 46 [Dec 10] Mailer's addressing style merits 33c penalty for postcard 48 50 50 ***** 2013 ***** 50 50 [Jan 14] Knowing postal rates is the way to decipher markings on mail 50 [Feb 11] Chicago postal book explains N.S.M.D., many other markings 52 [Mar 11] Reply-paid postal cards sent via foreign airmail are rarities 54 [Apr 8] 'Postal Bulletin' Searchable Database, 1880 to 2012, now online 56 [May 13] Help for a common query finding US postmasters by locale 57 [June 10] A short history of the handling of misaddressed US mail 59 [July 8] Early Priority Mail items franked with stamps are turning up 61 [Aug 12] Liberty series stamps are hard to find on C.O.D. mailings 63 [Sept 9] Still elusive modern definitives on small packets mailed by air 64 [Oct 14] The return of undeliverable first-class domestic postcards 66 [Nov 11] Regulations for returning undeliverable postal cards evolved 68 [Dec 9] Garage sale find has Liberty series used for air parcel post 70 70 INTRODUCTION I began to accumulate “tear sheets” of the columns in this series beginning with the first one published in Linn’s Stamp News on Nov 8, 2004. I continued saving these “tear sheets” until January 2008, when Amos Press, Inc. (changed to Amos Media Company on July 1, 2014) began to create and distribute their digital edition of Linn’s Weekly Stamp News, at which time the paper copies were filed away, and I began to extract and save the digital version of each column. Several years ago, I became interested in compiling some sort of cumulative digital version of these columns. I began to review my paper and digital files to see how complete they might be. Tony kindly supplied me with a copy of his master list of columns, organized by date of publication and his original title, which typically was different from the final published title. With this list at hand, I discovered that over the years, I had failed to “capture” a few columns from several years of publication. I was able to recover all of the missing columns published between 2008 through the present time from the digital archives provided on the Linn’s Weekly Stamp News website at the time. Tony then offered to provide copies of the earlier columns I was missing. He also informed me that his agreement with Amos Media Company returned the copyright ownership of these articles to him three months after the date of publication, which made this digital collection possible. The original version of these consolidated columns consists of all columns published by Linn’s through the end of 2016. These were organized into one single, but very large PDF file, which was awkward to distribute. We then broke the file down into a sequence of files, where each PDF file included all columns for a three-year period. The distribution of these files was limited. For a while, a version was available on the website of the American Philatelic Research Library, with a link to them from the catalog entry for Tony’s columns. Unfortunately, that link disappeared during the redesign of their website site. In early 2020, I extracted the files for the years 2017-2019 and created a new PDF file with columns from those years. With Tony’s permission, I contacted Don Denman, operator of the Stamp Smarter website: http://www.stampsmarter.com/learning/Home_Learning.html and asked if he would be interested in hosting this series of columns in his on-line Stamp Smarter Digital Library, and he agreed to do so. We have prepared the following set of five PDF files of a smaller, more manageable, size, organized by years, as follows: Part 1 – Nov. 8, 2004 through Dec. 10, 2007 (46 MB) Part 2 – Jan. 14, 2008 through Dec. 13, 2010 (45 MB) Part 3 – Jan. 10, 2011 through Dec. 9, 2013 (49 MB) Part 4 – Jan. 13, 2014 through Dec. 12, 2016 (28 MB) Part 5 – Jan. 2, 2017 through Dec. 9, 2019 (12 MB) Several of the columns scanned from my “tear sheets” may have a few words missing from where the sheets were carelessly torn from the issue of Linn’s. I apologize for this. Anyone who did a better job of preserving the column is encouraged to scan their version and send it to me and I will replace it in the combined file. Each column was scanned at 150 dpi, and when the column was originally published on two or more pages, these were stitched into a single file, and then each column was converted into a PDF file. Some of the illustration images in these files are not as legible as one might like, but experiments with scanning at higher resolutions were not successful at improving the view ability of the illustrations. The columns extracted from the digital edition of Linn’s were cropped to eliminate much of the advertising in order to improve readability. I have also included one “Forerunner” article published by Tony in the Linn’s Stamp News edition of July 14, 2003. Those columns created by scanning have been processed by an OCR engine to make them searchable. Columns extracted from the digital edition of Linn’s Stamp News were created with the searchable feature. A series of PDF “bookmarks”, consisting of the date of each column and its title, has been provided, and in addition, there is a detailed Table of Contents which appears at the beginning of each PDF File. You can go directly to any article by clicking on the appropriate Table of Contents entry. Please report any errors to me. Mike Ludeman [email protected] Linn's Stamp News ©2010 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110110&s=18... 1 of 2 12/27/2010 10:30 AM Linn's Stamp News ©2010 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110110&s=18... 2 of 2 12/27/2010 10:30 AM Linn's Stamp News ©2011 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110214&s=28... 1 of 5 1/31/2011 9:09 AM Linn's Stamp News ©2011 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110214&s=28... 3 of 5 1/31/2011 9:09 AM Linn's Stamp News ©2011 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110214&s=28... 5 of 5 1/31/2011 9:09 AM Linn's Stamp News ©2011 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110314&s=34... 1 of 2 2/28/2011 12:29 PM Linn's Stamp News ©2011 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110314&s=34... 2 of 2 2/28/2011 12:29 PM Linn's Stamp News ©2011 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110411&s=32... 1 of 1 3/28/2011 9:32 AM Linn's Stamp News ©2011 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110509&s=20... 1 of 2 4/25/2011 9:12 AM Linn's Stamp News ©2011 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110509&s=20... 2 of 2 4/25/2011 9:12 AM Linn's Stamp News ©2011 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110613&s=20... 1 of 1 5/31/2011 2:11 PM Linn's Stamp News ©2011 Amos Publishing http://editions.amospublishing.com/LINN/print.aspx?d=20110711&s=26..