Our January speaker was fellow club member Wade Saadi, who gave a fascinating presentation on fancy cancels on the 1851-68 issues. Wade's talk, which focused on the 1851 imperforate and 1857 perforated issues, drew a large number of members and guests. He showed a very wide range of cancels, running from simple town markings to fancy cancels such as the running stag. Some of the examples shown were likely the finest known copies. Those who attended Wade's talk were rewarded with color copies of ...

                                                     Our meeting of March 10 featured Janos Gabriel, who showed us an incredible array of illustrated advertising covers. This collection covered a wide variety of topics, including medical advertising, ad collars, Civil War period covers and many types of manufacturers and their products. Each cover was special in its own way, whether it was a multicolored beauty, a rarely seen topic, an intricately embossed cover or just a rare usage. ...

  Our May 12 speaker, Alan Berkun, dazzled us with a great number of very rare (and several unique) first day covers and earliest known usages (EKU). Alan's talk centered on the efforts needed to verify earliest known usages and earliest documented covers. He discussed the many problems encountered in this field and showed a broad array of items. These included: four different FDCs of Scott #10 (three cent Orange Brown); an FDC of #64b (rose pink); Oct. 1, 1883 FDCs for the two cent brow...

  Bob Markovits gave an engrossing presentation on the five cent Taylor and Garfield stationery covers, showing us a wide variety of usages and destinations. This included foreign destinations such as Japan, Hawaii, China, Russia and Australia. Bob also showed examples of fancy cancels, supplementary mail, Wells Fargo and registered mail, and noted the relative rarity of all but the most common usages of these stationery items.    

  Our September speaker, Jon Rose, flew in from the West Coast to give our club a fascinating talk on the two cent 1869 issue. Jon brought along a good many covers showing a wide variety of usages. This included some of the earliest known usages of the stamp; unusual auxiliary markings; illustrated advertising covers; and usages on wrappers. Jon also provided us with a great deal of information about the stamp itself, including its design features, different varieties of the stamp, and ...

   Our last speaker was Wade Saadi, who presented fancy cancels of the 3¢ 1861 issue in glorious profusion.  It was practically an illustrated version of Amos Eno’s U.S. Cancellations 1845-1869 section on the 1861s.  There was page after age of stamps with radial cancels, pinwheels, polygons, fancy geometrics, stars, crosses, patriotics, masonics, year dates, numerals, letters, words, heads objects and the ever popular Waterbury killers.  Each was selected to be among the finest known in...

Peter Schwartz, our guest speaker for December, gave a very interesting and informative talk on U.S. essays and proofs, and the use of the Internet in collecting. Peter brought along computer equipment and graphically demonstrated his website, Essay-Proofs Collectors Online, to all of the attending members. As he clicked his way from one "page" of the website to another, one could recognize the vast wealth of information that can be offered through such a website. He showed how the scanned image...