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A cancellation (or cancel for short; French: "oblitération") is a postal marking applied on a postage stamp or postal stationery to deface the stamp and prevent its re-use. Cancellations come in a huge variety of designs, shapes, sizes and colors. Modern United States cancellations commonly include the date and post office location where the stamps were mailed, in addition to lines or bars designed to cover the stamp itself. The term "postal marking" sometimes is used to refer specifically to the part that contains the date and posting location, although the term often is used interchangeably with "cancellation."〔L.N. Williams, ''Fundamentals of Philately'' (American Philatelic Society, State College, PA rev. ed. 1990) p. 20.〕 The portion of a cancellation that is designed to deface the stamp and does not contain writing is also called the "obliteration"〔Scott US p. 30A.〕 or killer. Some stamps are issued pre-cancelled with a printed or stamped cancellation and do not need to have a cancellation added. Cancellations can affect the value of stamps to collectors, positively or negatively. The cancellations of some countries have been extensively studied by philatelists and many stamp collectors and postal history collectors collect cancellations in addition to the stamps themselves. ==History== The first adhesive postage stamp was the Penny Black, issued in 1840 by Great Britain. The postal authorities recognized there must be a method for preventing reuse of the stamps and simultaneously issued handstamps for use to apply cancellations to the stamps on the envelopes as they passed through the postal system.〔Stanley Gibbons, p. 42.〕 The cancels were handmade and depicted a Maltese cross design. Initially, the ink used was red, but it was found that this could be cleaned off and the stamps reused, and so after a series of experiments, early in 1841 black cancelling ink was used, which was more permanent. The color of the stamps was also changed to red-brown so as to ensure that the cancellation showed clearly.〔 Britain soon abandoned the Maltese crosses and in 1844 began to employ cancellations displaying numbers which referred to the location of mailing.〔Stanley Gibbons, pp. 51-55.〕 A similar scheme was used for British stamps used abroad in its colonies and foreign postal services, with locations being assigned a specific letter followed by a number, such as A01 used in Kingston, Jamaica, or D22 for Venezuela.〔Stanely Gibbons, ''Stamp Catalogue, Part 1, British Commonwealth 1987'', London & Ringwood (89th ed. 1986), pp. GB65-GB72.〕 Early cancellations were all applied by hand, commonly using hand stamps. Where hand stamps were not available, stamps often were cancelled by marking over the stamp with pen, such as writing an "x". Pen cancellations were used in the United States into the 1880s,〔Scott US p. 29A.〕 and in a sense continue to this day, when a postal clerk notices a stamp has escaped cancellation and marks it with a ball point pen or marker. In the early period of the issuance of postage stamps in the United States a number of patents were issued for cancelling devices or machines that increased (or were purported to increase) the difficulty of washing off and reusing postage stamps. These methods generally involved the scraping or cutting-away of part of the stamp, or perhaps punching a hole through its middle. (These forms of cancellation must be distinguished from perfins, a series of small holes punched in stamps, typically by private companies as an anti-theft device.) High speed cancellation machines were first used in Boston between 1880–1890 and subsequently throughout the country.〔 Today, cancellations may either be applied by hand or machine. Hand cancellation is often used when sending unusually shaped mail or formal mail (e.g., wedding invitations) to avoid damage caused by machine cancellation. Postal meter stamps and similar modern printed to order stamps are not ordinarily cancelled by postal authorities because such stamps bear the date produced and can not readily be re-used. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cancellation (mail)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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