Dear friends,
time to give this thread a boost again.
Prephilately is one of the most rewarding fields of collecting postal history, in more than one sense of the word. You don’t have to worry about forgeries too much and every piece you add to your collection brings with it a sense of history that will survive when all the paper from later ages has turned into dust. The machine-produced paper that flooded receptive markets from the mid-19th century onwards had many advantages: it was hyper-smooth, extra-white and dead cheap. It seemed like a real progress then, but as it is with so many inventions human ingenuity has brought about, the long-term effects are devastating. We are now facing a serious problem. Have you ever tried to carefully erase a pencil marking (brainlessly added by a dealer) from a letter written on thin machine-produced paper, ca. 1880, with a rubber? You might end up with a nasty surprise when, for example, one corner comes off without warning. All wood-containing paper deteriorates with time, literally being eaten up from the inside because the ingredients turn sour. The most visible aspect of this process is a change of colour from white to various shades of brown. In the end the paper structure is so weak, the sheet will break like glass even when the faintest mechanical pressure is being applied. Libraries and archives are facing an uphill fight against the deterioration of large parts of their collections. They have found ways to make files and books acid-free again, but the process is laborious and expensive. And it won˚t help collectors of letters because part of the process involves drenching the paper in (chemical) solutions to get rid of the acid that has built up inside. Imagine for yourself what that means for inks and stamps.
You have to be really roughing it to see the same happen to a letter written on old-fashioned laid or wove paper that was made up to about 1850. If you don’t stab, burn or drown such a piece, the chances it will survive approach 100 percent. Don’t expose them to direct sunlight. Avoid using clear protective sheets made from PVC, because red markings might turn into black when stored under almost air-tight conditions. Don’t apply chemicals if you don’t have to. A dry environment with stable temperatures will certainly help. But that’s about it.
With a prephilatelic letter, character comes in buckets and bags. As I said earlier, the smell and rustle of old paper is simply irresistible. People didn’t write as if they were using brooms dipped in ink, but very often considered handwriting an art and a form of courteousness. Postmarks weren’t standardised so much, and even if they were, intriguing and beautiful exceptions to the rule were still abundant. Manuscript markings denoted postal rates (sometimes many of them) and both sides of a letter were (and still are today!) important, because transit markings and seals on the backside reveal a lot about the routes these letters took or give hints about the people who wrote them. With social philately gaining ground, the historical importance of not only the postal aspects of a letter has grown steadily in recent years.
I bought the letter shown in this posting because of the method it was delivered to its addressee. Imagine you’re a civil servant in Bavaria in the first third of the 19th century and you need evidence that a certain letter has reached not only its destination, but was delivered straight into the hands of the addressee, evidence that would stand up in court, if necessary. Now, what to do? To aggravate your position, the addressee, although having bonds of some sort with your country, is living in a neighbouring country, so a registered letter and a return receipt won’t probably be a proposition, because special handling of letters like this wasn’t stipulated in the applicable bi-lateral postal conventions. To shorten the story considerably, the addressee had provided for a solution. He nominated a mandatary in the person of a priest domiciled on the bavarian side of the border. The castle of Sachsgrün was (still is) situated in Saxony, while Arzberg, where the Protestant pastor Scherertz lived, is a place in Bavaria.
I love the look of the letter, and it fits snugly in my collection of specially delivered letters.
I would certainly like to treat you to more details, but this posting is getting too long anyway, and there is some danger you won’t be any wiser, so I bid you good night for today.