District overprint

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The district overprints on the postage stamps of Mexico were a special type of overprint used as an anti-theft system. They first came into use in 1856, with the first stamps of Mexico, and continued until 1885.

The Mexican postal system divided the country into about 50 "districts", each of which had a main office and a number of suboffices. The district office ordered stamps from Mexico City, they would be shipped by stagecoach unoverprinted, and then the district office would handstamp each stamp with the name of the district. The overprinted stamps would then both be sold directly to postal customers, and shipped to suboffices.

In theory, only overprinted stamps were valid for postage, but given the error potential of applying the marking to each individual stamp, a small number of unoverprinted uses are known. Also, some offices failed to comply with orders and simply sold their stamps unoverprinted.

In 1864, the system was refined by shipping the stamps from Mexico City with an invoice number and year already overprinted.

Sometimes the district office's overprint included a number designating the suboffice for which the stamps were intended, and occasionally suboffices applied their own handstamps. Larger offices had several different designs of handstamp in use; Mexico City used five different devices to handstamp the stamps of 1856, each with a different appearance, while the districts of Guadalajara, Guanajuato, Puebla, Queretaro, and San Luis Potosi each had three devices.

The color of the district name was almost always black, but red, blue, and violet overprints are known. For a period in 1858, the postmaster of Zacatecas, who had fled the city for Aguascalientes to escape the fighting during the Reform War, but had left his handstamp, wrote in "Zacatecas" by hand.

For many years, philatelists were mystified by the overprints, until Samuel Chapman, a British businessman living in Mexico, took an interest and researched the postal archives. His 1926 book, since reprinted, includes extensive detail on the shipments to the various districts.

Many of the overprints are rare, and command high prices among specialists in Mexican stamps. They have also been forged.

[edit] References

• Dale Pulver, Introduction to the Stamps of Mexico (Linn's Stamp News, 1992)
• Dale Pulver, "District overprints of Mexico's classic era", Linn's Stamp News, October 28, 1996
• Samuel Chapman, The Postage Stamps of Mexico 1856-1868 (1926, reprinted 1976)