Foreign Meter Mail imprints

Often overlooked while we scramble to fill in spaces in our albums with gorgeous engraved and modern pictorial stamps, there are a few thousand designs of meter mail from around the world.  Here are a few samples from different countries showing the range of designs, from simple numeric placeholders to full slogan cancels that ran for limited periods of time.  I hesitate to call these "stamps" since they never had physical print runs, but they would definitely qualify as "imprints" of the master designs.

Even here, you can specialize in countries, time periods, and topical items.  About half of these are airline advertisements.  That alone could keep a collector busy for a lifetime.  I suppose it would be most complete to collect these on covers where I could see the exact person or company these were mailed from or sent to, but I actually prefer the clippings: they take up less space and as I set aside the few I find in each new batch I sell, the quantity I gather is fun to flip through, always revealing more patterns to think about.  When was each design issued?  What were the different printing methods?  But for now, I just keep some binders of these for a rainy day.

This is just a casual sample from some envelopes I was scanning some years go.  In the future, I may post scans of other lots I have put together for sale, but I have no catalogues or technical insight into these issues.