 I can remember in grade school, sixth grade, every one of us children designed a page for a book celebrating Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving I think because we lived in New York where he wrote this thing. So I can remember my page and many years later I wrote to my sixth grade teacher because we kept up a correspondence even after I had moved to New York City and she mentioned I think that the book had gone into one of the local county museums or something like that. That was my only childhood effort at drawing. I still don't draw. I am a scribe. I write calligraphically. I'm too inhibited to draw. I have a very harsh critic up here in my head that says it's not good enough yet. Don't show that to anyone. First day covers are envelopes with new stamps on them canceled especially on the day that they are sold to the public. In the United States stamps are issued in specific cities usually. For instance if a stamp is sold on the first day in San Francisco it's usually canceled San Francisco California with the date and the inscription first day of issue. Stamp collectors worldwide are eager to collect these things. They have been bitten by the collecting bug probably as children and they eagerly await new stamps canceled first day of issue to add to their collection. I belong to a generation of several hundred centuries ago when children were eager stamp collectors. There was no television. There was only radio. There were movies but you had to go out to the movie house. But a stamp collection was often a source of pride and joy to the child. My brother had his own collection and I had mine and we used to fight horrendously over who would get what stamp and whose was better looking. A lot of competition there. We knew what first day covers were. At the time for many many years at that era postage was three cents and the stamp was always purple. The one-cent stamp was always green and the two-cent stamp I think was red. This was a postal tradition that went back many many years and so there is there were a couple of stamps that were magenta that were hypnotic for me. I think it's when I first began to notice and love that color. Fast forwarding now 40 years I guess. I don't recall exactly. But I was in a different situation. I was grown relatively mentally even somewhat and I was a father of a son living in Berkeley California while I was living in San Francisco and I remembered with great joy my childhood stamp collection. Also I was working at that time part-time in the post office at Rincon Annex in downtown San Francisco and in the lobby of the building every month or so there would be a poster on the wall announcing with a picture and where to send away for it the new stamp of the month and then at the time the postage was six cents if you can believe that and I remember sending these two blank envelopes with 12 pennies glued onto a strip to the postmaster of the city mentioned in the poster and then several weeks later I would receive at my home a first day cover with that stamp and a cancellation and I knew at the same time Stephen would receive one at his home. For about the first 10 years all of the covers were almost identical at the time I had learned only italic and unshaled alphabets and so I used them. Later on there was a turning point when I realized the image on the stamp was distinctive enough for me to begin designing these in terms of that image. When I was living in San Francisco and then after my son had moved back to Britain the airmail postage to the UK was more than the airmail postage or rather than local postage so I would arrange his stamps always in a block of four on the upper right hand corner of the envelope and I remember a specific issue the Brooklyn Bridge in 1983 I had my envelope with the single stamp next to his envelope with a block of four but his was so much better looking with the block of four that from then on I always used a block of four on my own envelopes. I had behind me about 10 years of calligraphy lessons and so I used broad steel pens once in a while a copper plate pen nib and I used whatever ink I had. As we all of us local calligraphers became more sophisticated I began using turkey or goose quills after I had learned how to make them and I had a set of Japanese colored ink sticks which I would grind on inkstones I had a separate one my red ink stick I would grind on a stone reserved for red etc. For black I stayed with a very important liquid Japanese Sumi ink made by the firm of Boku Eki which I still have probably a half bottle left. When it came to the exotic colors like gold and silver I found that real gold and real powdered silver did not work so I used imitation pan colors for the gold and for the silver I still have a jar of powdered pelican silver ink. When I started in 1968 the US issued roughly one stamp each month and in Britain which I have a large collection of they were also similarly quite limited. Now both of these countries issue them in such bushel wise quantities that it's almost impossible to count them. I was so shy and sheepish and I thought something as personal as this would not appeal to anyone else. Our local group the Friends of Calligraphy began having a monthly series in the library the old library which is now the Asian Art Museum. I brought what I had of my collection at that time very sheepish thought nobody could possibly be interested in this and to my astonishment everybody was fascinated beyond my wildest expectations. It seems that there may be a law here like the more personal your work the more people will be interested in it but I don't know if that's universally true. I would leave it up to each particular individual to say how does this appeal to you and can you put it into words because I cannot.