posted 03-27-2023 11:44 AM               

Space Cover 694: No Cancel, No Problem!

Collectors who send for their own covers are familiar with receiving covers returned through the mail with poor or even no cancels on them. This was especially true in the early days of collecting with recovery ships where the ships postmark would only contain some of the letters of the ship's name.

I have seen many of those recovery ship covers where the collector has "completed" the cancel by filling in the unstamped letters in the name using a pen or pencil.

But what if there was no cancel on the envelope - no problem - create your own!!! Pictured above is a cover which the collector sent to the prime recovery ship USS Hornet for the Apollo 12 lunar landing mission. After the cover was received with no cancel, the collector added their own in ink.

Adding only the CDS portion of the postmark, the collector did include the ship name and number — USS Hornet (CVS-12) — and the date including the time slug — Nov 24/AM/1969 — as in the actual ship postmark format.

Anyone have other "collector" cancels to share?