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..own stamps on site. Collectors refer these as Contracted Devices. When a Post Office had a device made in their community, it is considered a L o c a l Device. Local Type precancels were created with a wide variety of devices, included handstamps, movable type, mimeographs, addressographs, and Multigraphs, etc. There were also devices called Electroplates and Stereotypes. The Electroplates usually contained 100 subjects and were applied to full sheets of 100 stamps on a printing press. Stereotypes were metal handstamps, and were first prepared in 25-subject formats, but later changed to 10-subject formats. Other devices were made to precancel as few as 5 stamps at a time. In larger cities, special machines were employed to precancel coils of stamps.Postal regulations resulted in a variety of changes in precancels over the years. For example, in 1938 the Post Office Department decided that all stamps precanceled Locally, in denominations above six cents should include the month and year as well as the user's initials. This was to prevent their reuse at a later time. While the regulations said six cents, they can also be found on stamps of lower denominations. When the initials, the date, and the precancel were applied to a stamp using a single device, the stamps are known a Integrals. Because a new device was needed every month, only large companies, such as Montgomery Ward, used them. More often, the precancel was applied with one device, and the date and initials were applied with a different device. Stamps processed in this way are called Dateds. The Post Office issued no order rescinding of this requirement, but the use of Integrals faded rather quickly, while Dateds lasted longer, with a few being produced in the 1970s and %u201880s.In Indiana, 565 Cities and towns used precancels of 1,154 types, on an unknown number of different postage-stamp issues and denominations. One precancel specialist I spoke with, Dick Laetsch, who had been a collector for 50 years, told me he had six three-inch volumes filled with different precanceled stamps from Indiana alone.When the two-letter state abbreviations came into use in 1965, the Post office Department directed that the new abbreviations be used on L o c a l Type precanceling devices. In an apparent cost-saving measure, they also said that existing devices (with the old abbreviations) should be used until they were no longer serviceable. In 2007, which was a number of years after the Post Office had been producing precancels with only lines, and no city and state, individual post offices were prohibited from making any more precancels, and were ordered to destroy all their L o c a l Type precancel devices.In 1921, the Precancel Club of America was formed, but it soon changed its name to the Precancel Stamp Society (PSS), which continues to exist. The organization held its first convention in Denver, Colorado in 1922. The next year, the International Precancel Club, which had been organized in 1910, merged with the PSS at a convention in Washington, DC. In 1933, the PSS held its eleventh convention at Indianapolis in the Hotel Lockerbie, and its 64thconvention was at the Executive Inn in Vincennes in 1985. The Philatelic Gossip was PSS%u2019s first newsletter, but it later communicated through the Precancel Bee and the Precancel Optimist, with the Precancel Forum being used today. In 1923, the organization produced a Yearbook for the first time containing important information about the society and a roster of members. It continues to produce a series of very detailed catalogs on all aspects of precancel stamp identification and collecting. Over the years, more than 8,000 individuals have belonged to the PSS, and the organization boasts more than 950 members in the 21stcentury, who hail from 48 states, and over 20 foreign countries. Some states have maintained their own chapters, as did Indiana%u2014the Hoosier Precancel Stamp Club%u2014but it is no longer active.Some people only collect Bureau Types. The other major area of collecting is called Town and Type. It involves collecting one stamp of each type from each town, and Bureaus are included as types. A Town and Type collection can be expanded into collecting many different stamp issues and denominations from a particular town and type. This is called a General Collection.