@ alexiosp [#7]

What an amazing find. Congratulations. Many collectors have no idea how rare classical and even certain more modern machine cancels are.

Some of the earlier machine cancels simply cannot be obtained. This may seem like an excessively positive statment, but it is true. Machine cancels were not a collecting interest until very recently. Even collecting of covers did not exist prior to WWI. I would be hard pressed to say if even in the 1930s the institution of a "cover dealer" existed, i.e., a dealer who gave attention to the whole cover and not just the stamp. In any event, when interest in this area started to grow, 50, 60, 70 years had passed without any attention being given to the preservation of rare cancellations. Generations of school children happily clipping away . . . Most surviving specimens today are in the hands of knowledgeable collectors.

Let me draw an example from a more recent family of cancellations, the American flag cancels. There are more than 300 flag cancellations of which less than five specimens are know. These are by no means "classical" cancels. Many of these rare cancels are from the 1920s. In addition, there are about 70+ towns (info from 1992) for which postal records indicate that a flag cancellation should exist, but not one single cancellation ever has turned up. NB, there is no other area of machine cancel collecting as thoroughly researched as the American flag cancellation. Collectors of these cancellations have been organized since the 1940s and the amount of research done surpasses that on any other machine manufacturer, any country, any period, by a wide margin.

Well, that is to say, congratulations (again).