Backstamp

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This reverse of a 1932 cover sent from Rae in the Northwest Territories to Toms River, New Jersey has a Toms River backstamp.

A backstamp, in philately, is a postmark on the back of a cover (almost invariably an envelope), showing a post office or station through which the cover passed in transit. The office of delivery may also backstamp a cover and this type of mark is also known as a receiving mark. Backstamps or receiving marks are sometimes, for convenience or due to local postal regulations, applied to the front of a cover.

Backstamps are often applied as documentation of transit times, lengthy ones in the case of ocean crossings or short ones in the case of airmail flights. Registered mail is often backstamped in order to show the chain of custody.

Mail that has had complex routings can have a dozen or more backstamps; although such covers may look positively blackened with the overlapping marks, they are not common, and highly valued by collectors of postal history and are described as "well travelled".

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