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Sales Agency, which shipped 200,000 covers overseas to fill requests from U.S. Embassies. On June 9, 1962, the day the Project Mercury stamps were withdrawn from sale, First Day Covers were also withdrawn from the Philatelic Sales Agency. In 1983, it was reported that the U.S. Postal Service still had 300,000 of them in storage.While the Cape Canaveral cancellation was the official one, many collectors had stamped envelopes cancelled at Post Offices all across the country, where the stamp had simultaneously been released. It took the Post Office until May 26, 1962 to release an official list of those 305 locations.Some collectors drove many miles to buy the surprise stamp, stick them to their blank envelopes, and have them postmarked. But they didn%u2019t have much time in some parts of the country. On the East Coast, in cities such as Boston, New York, and Baltimore, collectors had only about an hour-and-ahalf before their local Post Office closed. The further west in the country a Post Office was situated, the more time was available to patrons. Therefore, Honolulu, Hawaii had the most time to get the new covers cancelled, with the stamps released there at 10:30 AM, local time.It didn%u2019t take long for some collectors to want a cancellation from each of the 305 cities. Two collectors in particular, became very active in the drive to assemble a complete nationwide set of 305 covers. They were Monte Eiserman and Henry Scheuer, two American First Day Cover Society members, who eventually wrote several articles in the organization%u2019s First Days journal. During that hectic time, a collector named Ben Papell organized a Mercury Cover Collectors Club for trading and selling covers, and published a Merc Newsletter, which ran for 10 issues between November 1962 and April 1964. In 1963, another enthusiastic collector, Patricia Grace Siefert, compiled a typewritten guide, An Unauthenticated Classification of the First Day Covers of the Project Mercury Stamp, which listed postmarks from 248 of the 305 cities. She also included cancelations from aboard the various U.S. Navy recovery ships, and noted that some collectors, after buying stamps at one of the 305 cities, then drove to neighboring towns where they had covers cancelled. Her guide documented covers from 90 of those %u201cunofficial cities%u201d as well.