Folks here may know that I’ve been selling covers on eBay for the past 9 months.

People may not know that I produced the ODDITY Cachet back in the 1970s starting the project when I was still in high school. As such my eBay offerings feature some of these covers as I still have a decent inventory from the old days.

Last week I got a letter from the American First Day Cover society with an inquiry if I was THAT Tom Geiger. And it included a draft of a historical article on my product that was well researched and fairly accurate.

I was floored and responded to the fellow that I’d be happy to be interviewed. He lives a few towns from me so I told him I’d be happy to invite him over, and I’d need a little time to dig out the background material like old price listings and original cachet artwork.

Pretty to be seemed out after all these years and have my little project remembered!

To be continued..

re: An Interesting Letter

Please post a sample of your covers ...Very interesting
Cheryl

re: An Interesting Letter

In no particular order, just what I had with properly sized images on my laptop! Average printing was 500 copies. I did sell blanks for people to service their own. As I got close to the issue date, I'd service all the ones I had left.



Oddity Number One- Drummer boy idea came from a greeting card. Pen and ink drawn by a friend of mine, Don Feeney.



Oddity Number Three- Don Feeney did the artwork again, and had the artwork facing the other direction. We flipped the image which made Thomas Jefferson left handed. Nobody noticed!



Lindberg- Because of the popularity of this stamp issue, we did 1000 of these. And they were sold out! I did more, as well as the same on a blue envelope for the pictorial cancels at shows all year long. The little boy artwork was done by my girlfriend and I. That started a run of "cute kids" themes.



Clara Maass... There was an uproar in New Jersey that the stamp wasn't being issued from her birthplace on her birthday. So I grabbed a full box of postal stationary and ran up to East Orange on that date. The cachets were printed after the fact, but before the actual first day cancel was applied to the bottom. I thought these were going to be a roaring success, but I still have 100s! There was also a blank envelope done.

I always liked the Anderson cachets with text. I used that inspiration on this cover since I wanted to tell the story behind the extra postmark. I did a few more Anderson-esque cachets too.




Railroad theme cover for pictorial cancels. I had customers asking for me to do various themes, so I did the extra Lindberg, a Wright Brothers cachet and this railroad cover from clip art.



Thomas Jefferson cachet appeared in brown for July 4th cancellations. Once I had them cancelled in Hazlet, NJ my postmaster friend said they were too plain, so we printed the blue cachet on them to be specific.





Here's the Jefferson cover without the added blue cachet. And I did the Operation Sail covers since the slogan cancel was at a local post office. I remember driving there on the morning of July 4th! I did about 100 of each of the July 4th slogan covers.

Hope you enjoyed! There were a bunch more from 1976 through 1978. I didn't do every issue.