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CHICKEN STAMP FIRST DAY COVERSDorothy Knapp, Cachet DesignerBorn in 1907, Dorothy Knapp trained at Skidmore College to become a commercial artist and art teacher in Rhinebeck, New York. Most importantly for philately, from the late 1930s until she retired in 1956, she actively produced cachets. She designed them for large companies, such as Fleetwood, which produced thousands of covers, but also made small quantities of hand-painted covers%u2014some with just ten or twelve copies per stamp. According to Linn%u2019s Stamp News, %u201cFirst-day covers with handpainted Dorothy Knapp cachets are the gold standard of FDC collecting.%u201d Doug Weisz, who authored Dorothy Knapp: Philately and Family, said that when Dorothy started producing cachets, %u201chandpainting in first day covers was not widely done or accepted. In fact, some of her subscribers ended up sending them back. They just didn%u2019t want hand-painted covers.%u201d In those days, collectors preferred mass-produced designs. Plus, she charged 25%u00a2 per cachet, making her hand-painted cachets more expensive than those commercially printed. Eventually, though, she began to influence the style of other cachet artists.After her retirement, Dorothy gave her cachets away free to anyone who asked. Then, in the late 1970s, she learned that her early covers were selling for several hundred dollars each. So she began making new cachets again, and sometimes added her designs to older uncacheted covers. When she died in 1986, her Poughkeepsie Journal obituary remarked, %u201cShe was said to have been the most famous First Day Cover Cachet artist, providing artwork for envelopes commemorating the first issuance of a stamp.%u201d Oddly, Dorothy never collected stamps herself, nor did she belong to any philatelic organizations, nor did she subscribe to any philatelic publications. Yet her distinctive cachets continue to command premium prices, often in the $300 to $1,000 range.Cachet by Dorothy Knapp, M-29.Addressed to the artist.