American First Day Cover Society

The American First Day Cover Society will give a lucky new member and whoever proposes that member each a $300 credit — the equivalent of 30,000 pennies — to welcome member #30,000.

The winners can spend their prizes on the AFDCS.org website, buying FDCs, catalogues and handbooks; joining, renewing or upgrading their memberships; paying for successful AFDCS auction bids; and more. The complete rules are on our website. (No, you cannot join, quit, and join again to try to hit #30,000! And your dog is not eligible.)

The AFDCS today does not have 30,000 members: It is closer to 1,200. Some numbers may have been skipped; some people may have received more than one number over the years; and, of course, some former members no longer collect.

Member #1 was Richard S. Bohn, who was one of the philatelic leaders who came up with the idea of a national society for first day cover collectors. Unfortunately, he passed away within a year after the founding in 1955. The earliest still active membership number is 10, Gerald Strauss, the first editor of First Days.

Silent Auction Donations Sought. Once again, we plan to have our always popular Hospitality Suite Silent Auction at Americover 2024. In order to have an auction, we need covers donated.  We are looking for items with a retail value of $10.00 or more.  Donations can be single items or bulk groups of covers.  Due to the time needed to prepare the covers and lots, please send your donations by June 30th, 2024. Please look at your duplicate covers and send your donation to:
 
Walter Douglas George
67 Pomeroy Lane
Amherst, MA 01002
 
If you have any questions, you can email Doug at WallyStamps2022@gmail.com
Or call him at 413-727-5856 and leave him a message.

Mitchell "Mick" Zais, a former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education, is now the chair of the Publications subcommittee of the American First Day Cover Society. Publications is a part of the Education Department of the AFDCS, which is chaired by Michael Lake.
 
Zais was also briefly Acting Secretary of Education in 2021 and has served as South Carolina Superintendent of Education and president of Newbury College. Before that, the West Point graduate had reached the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Army.
 
He has often told the story of how he was able to skip a required geography course at the U.S. Military Academy because of the knowledge he had gained from stamp collecting. Today, he specializes in the first day covers of the Army stamps of the Army-Navy Series of 1936-37 (Sc. 785-789).
 
Mick was elected to the AFDCS Board of Directors, beginning in January 2023. He served as president of the American Philatelic Society from 2016 to 2018, resigning to avoid a conflict of interest with his federal appointment.
 
"I look forward to working with our team at AFDCS to bring useful and important publications to our members," said Zais. "Most exciting is the recent permission acquired by the Society to re-print the Mellone first day cover catalogs."
 
The AFDCS has published books, handbooks, and catalogues on everything from the basics of FDC collecting to making cachets, from FDCs of the 1909 commemorative issues to those of the 1988 Cats issue. A complete list can be found in the AFDCS Marketplace. The Education Department of the AFDCS also has a YouTube Channel and produces videos on various facets of FDC collecting.

Popular Artist Will Be at AFDCS Booth To Sign Covers, Meet Collectors
Professional artist Chris Calle again will design the official show cachets for Great American Stamp Show 2024. He also will be at the American First Day Cover Society booth during the show to autograph covers and stamps with his designs and chat with collectors.

During his 40+ years as an illustrator his artwork focused on historical subjects and the theme of space exploration produced in paint and pencil for publications, advertising, coins and FDCs. Chris has designed more than 35 postage stamps for the United States and hundreds more for countries as diverse as Sweden and the Marshall Islands, as well as designs for the United Nations.

Chris’s US postage stamp design work includes the two stamps celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the first Moon Landing jointly designed with his father Paul Calle who designed the iconic #C76 First Man on the Moon stamp in 1969. Perhaps Chris’s most well-known solo artwork is the $2.40 Priority Mail stamp design of 1989 (Sc. 2419), which depicts Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planting the American flag on the moon. 

For more than a decade Chris has designed the show cachets for the major U.S. summer stamp collecting shows as well as many regional stamp shows throughout the country. Among other stamp and cover design awards, Chris' first day cover cachets have won the top prize in the annual AFDCS contest several times.
 
The AFDCS is a co-sponsor of the Great American Stamp Show, which includes the Americover first day cover exhibition and announcement of the results of its annual cachetmaking contest. GASS this year is being held in Hartford, Conn., August 15-18, 2024. Admission is free.

A new edition of the American First Day Cover Society’s AFDCS Directory of Current Cachetmakers is now available. The January 2024 version can be downloaded for free via this link. Printed versions are available for $5.00 postpaid from AFDCS Sales; order here.

Compiled by John White of North Carolina, the directory seeks to list every individual or company currently producing cacheted first day covers, whether or not they are members of the AFDCS. There is no charge for listings; cachetmakers who wish to be included in a future edition should fill out the online form here.  

New editions of the directory are published when there are a number of additions or changes, so the next version may be next month or next year. The link to the latest edition — whatever it is — is on the home page. The January 2024 edition adds 11 cachetmakers, removes 14 and updates six.

Two works tied for first place in the American First Day Cover Society’s Philip H. Ward, Jr., Memorial Award for Excellence in First Day Cover Literature published in 2022. One recipient was Henry Scheuer, for his two-part article “How the Earliest Collectors Sought Out First Days” in The American Philatelist in November and December 2022. This article also won the 2023 United States Stamp Society’s Barbara R. Mueller Award.
 

The other winner was a book, The Connecticut Tercentenary Issue of 1935, by Peter J. LaPlaca and Anthony F. Dewey. Included in the book is a complete catalogue of all known cachets for the issue, Sc. 772.
 
The runner-up work was the article "Earliest Documented Uses of the Large Bank Note Stamps" by Ralph Nafziger, which appeared in the November 2022 issue of The Chronicle, journal of the U.S. Philatelic Classics Society.
 
Although all articles in First Days, the official journal of the AFDCS, are automatically considered for this award, "I find it interesting that none of these works was published in our journal, " said AFDCS president Lloyd A. de Vries. "Their publication in media not specifically about first day covers shows, in my opinion, the wider acceptance that FDCs are gaining."
 
A complete list of past winners can be found on this page.
 
Philip Henry Ward, Jr., began servicing first day covers in 1909. Although an electrical engineer by trade, he wrote on new issues for The American Philatelist, Mekeel’s Weekly Stamp News and The Weekly Philatelic Gazette in the early 20th century.

Candidates for the annual election for members of the board of directors of the American First Day Cover Society have been announced.

AFDCS members will elect four candidates for 2024-2026 three-year terms on the board. The candidates seeking election are Eric Wile, Jeff Hayward, Foster Miller and Patrick Morgan. Miller is a current director seeking reelecton, while Wile, Hayward and Morgan are seeking to join the board for the first time.

Candidate statements and the ballot will be sent by first-class mail to all AFDCS members this fall. All members are encouraged to vote.

The board meets in person once each year, in a meeting preceding Americover, the society's annual show and convention, now part of the Great American Stamp Show. The board also meets as necessary via video conference. Members of the board of directors are not compensated nor reimbursed for their expenses.