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---CVUX4 SPECIALIZED
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< Neither the Scott Specialized U.S. Stamp Catalog NOR the UPSS Postal Card Catalog do justice to the POSTAL BUDDY Cards. The listings in both barely scratch the surface.
Frankly, I didn't have a clue myself as to what was produced until recently when I purchased some of the inventory of Darrell Yeisley at auction. Yeisley was at the center of the Postal Buddy "empire", and was a major force in that area of Philately, having access to a large number of machines when the cards first were issued. He used the cards himself to advertise to his customers. As you can see from the scan below, he makes reference to 13 different styles of Postal buddies. In fact, there are 24. 2 of the cards I call CVUX4 and CVUX4a are listed in the "BASIC BUDDY" SECTION. These were "Philatelic Cards", and were designed mainly for Collectors. However, there are another 11 designs, intended for COMMERCIAL use, and for reasons I don't understand, were issued both WITH and WITHOUT Postage at the upper right. Total, 22, listed in this section. NOW, there are several numbers in use here... the Scott number (CVUX4, the UPSS number (PB3a2), another descriptive number (e.g. PSE001) which appeared on the Postal Buddy receipts, and finally, I had to throw in a plain number (3 thru 24) to keep these listings in order. Bringing order to chaos is not an easy job. (P.S....Scott doesn't actually give this card a number. I just call it CVUX4.) THESE LISTINGS are all MINT. The term MINT means "as issued by the Post Office", which is what these were, since the Postal Buddy kiosks were part of the U.S. Postal System. We often use the terms "Unused" or "Preprinted" to describe cards which have printing applied, PRIVATELY, after cards were bought at the P.O.. But these cards were NOT printed privately. The printing you see at the left was applied IN THE SYSTEM. The CVUX4 cards are "front-identical" to the CVUX3 cards. The only difference is the BACK sides of the cards. The CVUX4 cards were only in use for a short period of time, and very roughly 20 times as scarce as the CVUX3. Here are some printing figures from the UPSS Catalog: 342,000 cards (est.) with Basic front, Type B Backside, (b)(c)  |