Stamp Smarter Library - International Mail

DIRECTORY OF INTERNATIONAL MAIL
1954 – 1969

INTERNATIONAL MAIL
1970 – 1978

Contributed by Mike Ludeman

When the United States Post Office Department discontinued the Official Postal Guide in 1954, they moved most of the instructions related to the handling of international mail into Chapter 2 of the new Postal Manual. At the same time, they created a new handbook, Publication 42, Directory of International Mail, which included the large volume of country specific regulations that were unique to individual foreign countries, which had been previously maintained as part of the Official Postal Guide, Part II, which had been published during the years between 1937 and 1954.

The physical format of this new publication followed that of the Postal Manual. It was distributed in a loose-leaf format using 6” by 9” pages and a special binder. All distributions of revisions and updates were provided to the holders of the Directory of International Mail in a format identified as ”Transmittal Letters” (TLs). All revisions and updates were provided in the form of replacement pages, that is, when any content on a page changed, an entirely new page was provided. This eliminated the need for the postal clerk to “tip-in” or paste in changes onto pages of the publication.

The date of the initial release of the Directory of International Mail is not known at the present but believed to be in late 1954. The publication and updates were distributed by a series of 75 TLs between 1954 and 1969. Some of these were full publication releases, with one or more incremental updates distributed between these full releases. A complete list of these publications and dates is not available at present.

Physical copies of this publication are uncommon. The USPS Library has a complete set of the Transmittal Letters distributed for this publication, but these currently exist only in bound volumes. No microfilm records are available, so the examples presented here are based on physical copies located by the compiler.

Because of the dynamic nature of the updates and revisions to this Directory of International Mail, physical copies of the publication found in institutional and private libraries have a restricted useful value for the postal historian, since each physical volume represents only a limited point in time when all information could be accurate, as the receipt of the next Transmittal Letter would make some segment of the publication obsolete.

Until a better source of information can be arranged, we have located and digitized a number of examples of these two publications, relying on holdings at the American Philatelic Research Library and private collections. The user must understand that these editions are simply snapshots of the postal regulations and instructions that were in effect at the time the physical manual was located and digitized. There is no assurance that these copies of either publication, as presented are complete, or up-to-date, but they represent the best resource that can be provided at the present time.

The Directory of International Mail continued to be the primary resource used by postal employees until the Congress enacted the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which disbanded the original United States Post Office Department and replaced it with the United States Postal Service. As part of the preparation for this transition, the USPOD began a reorganization of the current publication, and expanded it to include the materials which had previously found in the Chapter 2 – International Mail, which had been part of the prior Postal Manual, and they retitled the new publication simply as International Mail.

The available editions of both publication may be found here on Stamp Smarter.