Page 7 - British Post Office Notices 1666 to 1799

history. I am indebted to my wife, Virginia, and sons, Daniel and John, for their help in reviewing my
manuscript.

The firm of Argyll Etkin Ltd was most generous by giving me access to their considerable
inventory of postal history. Mr. Evans, a dealer in postal ephemera of the company Messengers,
Exeter, provided me with photocopies of some of the notices. Mr. David P. Robinson, of Kilmacolm
(Scotland) and Mr. Potts, of Virginia (USA) were also most gracious with their generous help.
I owe a special thanks to the British Postal Archives without which this book would never have
been possible. Mrs. Jean Farrugia and members of her staff, Katherine Tully and Kevin Squelch,
made great efforts to make all the original documents available to me both during my many visits to
the Archives and through subsequent correspondence. They have my admiration as well as my
gratitude. Mrs. Farrugia started the tremendous task of putting the Post Office Notices in a -
sequential order. Beginning in 1983, under her direction, the Notices were microfilmed. This
innovation not only provides greater convenience for the researcher but also the possibility of Xerox
copies taken from the film, not the more fragile originals. The originals of the Post Office Notices of
course remain Crown copyright.

As I neared the publication deadline for Volume 1 of the British Post Office Notices 1666-1899, I
learned of the work by Messrs. D. G. Haslam and C. Moreton, Post Office Notices extracted from The
London Gazette 1666 to 1800. I have reviewed Haslam and Moreton's volume, which renders a
valuable service. Information in their volume, however, is restricted to the Notices published by The
London Gazette. Due to my colleagues' self-imposed restriction, they could not include many
important Notices such as those concerning the Re-organization of the London Penny Post of 1794,
the new postal rates of January 1797 and many others.

For the technically inquisitive reader, I should mention that the text for this book was written on
an EPSON Equity Ill Plus using Microsoft Word as the word processor. The Index was created with
a combination of Microsoft Word and Basic programming. The printing was done on a Hewlett
Packard Laserjet Series II.

Michel M. Raguin
280 Boston Avenue
Medford, Massachusetts 02155 USA
March 25, 1991

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