*Published Summer 2024

A cachetmaker and science editor from the New Jersey area, Dani Leviss grew up in a philatelic household, with her father the co-founder of Barry and Gerry Covers and the BGC cachet line. She was designing first day cover cachets and learning the ropes of the trade for as long as she can remember. Today, she and her family produce BGC Legacy in her father’s memory and continue the cachet-making story.

You’ve been a part of philately, especially the first day cover community, for a long time – can you tell us how you got your start?

I was born into philately because my dad, Gerry, started Barry and Gerry Covers with his business partner right after I was born. They were dealers, selling different cachet lines and covers. I went to my first Americover show when I was nine months old. I used to color or nap under the dealer table and now I’m making cachets and selling them. So that’s how it started out.

At a certain point, my dad started the Barry and Gerry Covers cachet line as part of his home-based business. He would design for most, if not all, issues that came out… although for the first chunk of years, there weren’t as many new stamps issued as there are now. I don’t know if he would be designing for every single issue today because it’s a lot to keep up with.

As a kid, there were a couple of times that I played around on the computer and designed some stuff and showed it to him. And then he created covers out of it. I used to play around with shapes in Microsoft Publisher… I just was fooling around on the computer, making each animal in the lunar zodiac calendar out of shapes. He put each one on a cover and made a set of it. I wasn’t a cachetmaker then, I was just a kid having fun making pictures.

And then after he passed away in 2011, as a family – my mom [Donna], my brother, and me – we wanted to keep the business going, both the big picture business as a dealer, but also the cachet line arm of it.

My brother came up with the idea to rebrand the cachet line as BGC Legacy. It’s still the same Barry and Gerry Covers cachet line, but the new branding marks the evolution of it.

How does the BGC Legacy cachet-making process work? 

I do a lot of the artwork, but there are times when my mom has worked on some artwork and then I’ve put it together as the cachet design.

As an example [of my work], this cover was from the great American eclipse in 2017 and the total solar eclipse stamp release. I found a scan from an old newspaper online, this article about the 1918 eclipse… that referenced that “the next time something like this will happen will be 2017.” I took the masthead of that paper, that segment of the article, and the edges of the paper to design this cachet, because I thought it was so cool that, nearly 100 years prior, they were thinking about 2017 and then here we are, living in 2017.

We always put information on the back or front of our covers. That’s something my dad would always do, collect more information about the topic, educate people. He was a history major and very interested in teaching people about stuff. I think that was a big draw for him, with philately. My mom mostly does the writing and then I’ll edit it.

The designs happen in all different kinds of ways. The through line for BGC Legacy is that it’s very eclectic. So sometimes I’m drawing, I’m painting, I’ll play with text… This one was my mom’s work for the 10-cent Pears stamp. She stamped the fruit with paint and made prints and then I scanned all the prints she made and played with them and layered them on the computer in funky color combinations. We collaborated on that.

There are times where I’ll use a photo in the design. When the Scooby-Doo stamp came out… [you know] it’s hard to do anything with IP. So, we put a picture of my dog that we had just rescued the month before. So that was a cool way to work around copyright restrictions. I’m not just taking a picture of Scooby-Doo without permission.

We often will do multiple cachet designs for any particular stamp. That gives people more than one thing to buy or options if they resonate with one design over another. For example, for the Elvis stamps, we did a bunch of different designs about different aspects of his career. I came up with this design riffing on classic movie posters… So, I did that cartoonish Elvis dancing and then designed the text behind it.

Two different approaches for the 2015 Elvis stamp. Courtesy of Barry & Gerry Covers.

I take art classes from my town’s recreation department and most recently it’s been a lot of watercolor. So, for the Manatees and Carnival Nights stamps, I did a lot of watercolor. That’s the medium I’ve been really into at this moment.

There are some cachet lines that you can immediately recognize based on the style. But I guess with BGC Legacy you can recognize it in a way because there are so many different styles. If it doesn’t look like others, then it might be ours, you know what I mean? That’s what keeps it fun for me and for my family. And I hope for the collectors who buy my stuff.

So if I ask which medium you prefer, you might have a hard time choosing an answer?

Actually, the first BGC Legacy cover was a watercolor. I learned watercolor a little bit in high school and I did that for the cherry blossom centennial and then didn’t come back to watercolor until 12 years later.

And then there are the ones where I’m taking historical stuff that’s in the public domain… like those old newspapers. When The Snowy Day stamps came out, I did a variety of things. When the author of The Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats, was a teenager, he entered the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards with, I think it was an oil painting maybe. Anyway, I found the New York Times article that showed his artwork and had his name. I put that on the cover to show his early life. I also made a collage of kids playing or singing in the snow, because a theme of his books is kids being kids.

It’s about what’s best in service of the cachet design. Sometimes playing with text is a better way to go than drawing something. If somebody said, “You can only do covers in this one medium for the rest of your life,” I wouldn’t know what to do.

Can you tell me about the Cinderella souvenir sheet that you designed for StampEd?

[Designing a souvenir sheet] was just a different thing that I don’t often have the opportunity to do. And the concept of giving young people and people outside the hobby an entry point to this world was super appealing to me too.

We emailed and talked about the design and found our idea… And it also was related to what I was going through at the time… [helping her workplace unionize]. It meant I was thinking about what it means to protest and the labor movements… Not that this design has to do with labor movements, but it has that kind of energy, of activism in a way. That was appealing, as in the idea of pushing back at the traditional views of philately… Going down that path was very interesting to me. You had pitched the idea of like the…

Like the Riot Grrrl concept.

Yeah, a certain type of homemade posters, and collage, and it just kind of snowballed from there.

My favorite part of that style is… It has the same feeling to me where you’re sitting in a room on the floor with all of your friends and you’ve got glue and a ton of magazines that you’re cutting up and it’s so organic and community-focused.

I think the design I ended up with also speaks to the process of making art, the process of creating in general. I’m a firm believer that art is in the making, not the final product. So, I hope collectors can feel the making when they look at that souvenir sheet.

This also connects to how I design first day covers… It’s not a solitary thing. I enjoyed that we collaborated together to figure out which direction to go and retool how it looked.

What kind of things are you considering when you’re coming up with first day cover designs?

My mom and I will look at what stamps are coming out that year and either see what topics we’re drawn to or what topics we think collectors might be interested in. That narrows things down. And then one or both of us will start researching the topic if it’s something that we don’t know as much about and start brainstorming and workshopping ideas. We start designing and sketching out a plan first, and then place things together.

The elements that go into an FDC are the cachet artwork, the stamp, the postmark… we’re not that restrictive about the stamp placement, that the stamp has to go in the top right corner and the postmark has to go right next to it.

You probably saw in the Elvis FDC that the stamp was at the bottom and the postmark was next to it. We think of it as “how do all three elements work together in the best way?” Not like, “Well, this has to be here, so this has to be there.”

I mean generally, artwork goes on the left, and stamp and postmarks on the right. But other than that, it’s open for interpretation of where things look best, so the whole thing becomes cohesive. And then once all that is together, I’ll print out artist proofs to see how it’s looking on the envelope. We’ll print the informational text on the front or back and proof that. And then once everything is set, we’ll test it with a mock-up of the stamp and cancel.

Sometimes we print directly on #6 3/4 envelopes. Sometimes we print on nice white paper. And then I cut and fold the covers, the way my dad did. Sometimes that decision is made for efficiency because it goes faster if you don’t have to cut and fold the envelope. Though we used to have a printer where it was such a hassle to print on envelopes that it was easier to just print on paper and cut and fold.

Sometimes if I want a design to have a full bleed, then that has to be on a piece of paper, because you can’t print to the edge on an envelope.

Getting the stamp serviced is an important aspect of the design. How does that process work?

We buy the stamps ourselves at our local post offices. So sometimes that might mean my mom is calling four different post offices to get enough stamps because only one post office might carry a particular issue or they only have two panes of it.

I place them on the covers myself and we have to mail them out to Stamp Fulfillment Services in Kansas City. They have a specific order form that you have to use, and there are different charges for some of the services, like the digital color postmarks. The first 50 traditional postmarks are free, but if it’s over 50, you have to pay a certain fee per cancel. The digital color postmarks (DCP) you always have to pay for, so we only do those occasionally.

That’s another reason for doing two designs… we might just do one cachet design with the regular postmark, whether it’s the killer bars or the pictorial postmark, and then do one of the DCP, so that there are two different interesting things to buy. That’s thinking about cachet design from the business perspective. Because for us, of course, a lot of this is about the art and history and design, but it’s also a business. So, we send that package out to Kansas City and then they service it there and then mail it back.

But with something like the Pinback Buttons stamps, you’ll get them postmarked at GASS, where they’re being issued.

Yeah. Which will be nice, to not have to mail it out.

Are first day cover collectors focused on whatever’s come out most recently, or does it vary?

No, it’s mostly topical. So that’s why I’m interested in making covers for the new First Continental Congress issue, because I don’t have anything American history-related in my offerings. Adding that into the mix might be good because I think American history stuff is fairly popular. But I think when collectors buy my covers, it’s mostly because that topic appealed to them or that design appealed to them and it fits into their collection in some shape or form.

[Customers will] say “Do you have any movie stuff,” or “Do you have any of this particular obscure historical figure,” or ”We’re looking for stuff of this country…” I think the philatelic world has really shifted more towards topical collecting, from my vantage point.

What kind of topics appeal to you as a collector?

My favorite animal is the tiger, so a lot of my collection are tigers. Famous women is another big part of my collection. Pop culture stuff, Disney, Sesame Street, what interested me as a kid is still what interests me now. But also a lot of my collection is just designs that appealed to me.

There’s a classic story that my dad would tell, from when I was around four or five years old, and I went to Hank and Emmy Mezzack’s booth, H&M Covers, at a stamp show. I went through their covers, picked out what I liked, and boy did I have expensive taste, apparently, because it was a lot of hand-painted stuff. And my dad bought a few of the covers for me. Kids who come to shows, even at 4 years old or 10 years old, they like what they like.

If you look at all of the pop culture issues that are coming out, they are very unpopular with a lot of “true blue” stamp collectors. Where do you land on stamps about pop culture?

I think having a mix of issues throughout the year is ideal. Pop culture issues can be a way to get new collectors into the mix. I’m a first day cover collector, and I like pop culture issues.

But I see the comments. There are so many complaints about the Alex Trebek stamp. People are like, “Oh, why doesn’t it have his picture on it? And, why is it the same clue repeated on every stamp? They could have shown the clue and a picture of him.”

I don’t know how the design came to be, but I did read his memoir and he didn’t want to be the face of Jeopardy or care about the celebrity of it all. In the book, he talks about the contestants and the game itself being the star of the show, not him, so I feel like he would like the stamps. Not to speak for Alex Trebek…

Speaking of the current U.S. stamp schedule, are there current stamp issues that you love?

Well, I can tell you what I’m working on. I’m getting back into [designing first day covers] after a four-year hiatus because of grad school and starting my career. I was pretty consistent designing stuff 2012 through 2018. I did a little bit in 2020 and now I am designing stuff again, getting back in the game this year.

It’s something I’m passionate about, but it’s been hard to find the time. But even before [the hiatus], we never designed for every issue, there’s too many to do that. And not everything will sell well as a first day cover. Some of the choices that we made for which stamps we’ll do, it was dependent on      what issues were coming out when we had time to work on covers and also what seemed interesting to us.

And then there were a lot we were interested in and then had to scale back to what was actually feasible for us. I did two designs for the Manatee stamps. I did a set for Carnival Nights, focusing on carnival food. I’m planning to do Alex Trebek, of course, and Hank Aaron, and Dungeons of Dragons, though I haven’t made them yet. Pinback Buttons and Autumn Colors [which came out at the] Great American Stamp Show, I’m working on stuff for that.

With all of these, there are different things to consider. Whether it draws us, what we think might be appealing to collectors or outside the philatelic world, potentially. And what’s feasible with our schedule or opportunity to do it.

There were stamps earlier in the year that I liked, but I wasn’t working on covers when they came out and I didn’t want to be rushed with the 120-day deadline… because the sand in the hourglass is going fast.

You don’t have to be a philatelist to be interested in collecting first day covers.

Of all the covers you’ve designed, do you have a favorite?

I often go back to some early ones I did. The Jimi Hendrix one and the Janis Joplin one, those are from 10 years ago, but they’re still some of my best work. In terms of the artwork, the cachet itself, and how everything fit together as a first day cover.

The Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin stamps both were issued in 2014. These two covers remain Dani’s favorite of her work. Courtesy of Barry & Gerry Covers.

The Janis Joplin one is designed like a concert poster. It is a little different, because the stamp and the postmark are in the center and a lot of the artwork is on the right, instead of the left. With FDCs like that, you can forget that it’s a first day cover, it becomes an art piece in its own right. And that’s what appeals to me about first day covers in general. I was always a kid who loved art, drawing, painting, coloring, whatever, even putting stickers on things. So, as a collector, sometimes I just love that design – who cares about the topic, it’s just a really great design.

You don’t have to be a philatelist to be interested in collecting first day covers. For example, last summer, I took a one-week cartooning workshop at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. I’m still in touch with some of my classmates. We’ve talked about the MoCCA Arts Fest  in New York and how they’ve started this festival. And I thought, oh, wait, I could try selling my first day covers at a comics festival, or an art festival. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’d like to try.

It’s meeting people where they are. You can’t expect people to know about first day covers, if you don’t bring it to them. There are lots of other hobbies that have the collecting mindset, and they’d probably be interested in this other type of collecting but they just don’t know about it.

Since this is the DIY issue, do you have any other advice for people who are interested in designing cachets and first day covers?

Just play with what you’re interested in. One thing people can do immediately is buy the uncacheted FDCs from the postal service and just draw on them or glue stuff on them. It comes already serviced, so you don’t even have to send it out to get serviced. That’s a little baby step. They sell uncacheted FDCs for every single stamp that comes out.

Just try things and see what happens, show it to people and see what they think. And if you want to start selling cachets, look at what other cachetmakers produce, talk to other cachetmakers. That’s really true with anything you want to try, just talk to people that are doing it. I was born into [the business], but I still talk with other cachetmakers. I got a lot out of my YPLF [Young Philatelic Leaders Fellowship] experience working with my mentor Chris Calle, and that was a very valuable experience. You don’t have to be in a cave or in a silo. Just try different things, experiment, start with what appeals to you and then branch out from there.