Digital First Days Archive

AMERICAN FIRST DAY COVER SOCIETY DIGITIZES BACK ISSUES OF ITS JOURNAL
AFDCS Offers 57 Years of FDC Articles on Disk or Flash Drive

A digital archive of the American First Day Cover Society's award-winning journal First Days from the first issue in 1955 through 2011 is now available from the AFDCS, in a searchable PDF format. A copy on DVD is $79 postpaid, while the same material on a USB flash drive is $89.

Included in the files are 34,736 pages of material from 395 issues, invaluable for researchers, authors, exhibitors, philatelic judges and just about anyone who enjoys collecting FDCs. Each page appears as it did when it was issued, yet the entire archive is searchable.

FDdisk
Want to find all the articles in First Days on Dorothy Knapp? Just type "Dorothy Knapp" in the search box and you'll receive a list of every article on Knapp. Then just click on the link to read the article.

So, even if articles on a subject are scattered throughout the nearly 60 years the magazine has been published, they all can be found within a matter of seconds. There's no longer any need to dig through musty boxes and binders.

With back issues provided by Foster Miller and Alan Warren, as well as his own library, project manager Todd Ronnei was able to scan all 57 years in about six months.

"The best part was finding information on cachetmakers whose name I knew but about whom I knew almost nothing," Ronnei said. "Dick Monty's lengthy profiles of cachetmakers and others in the FDC hobby are pure gold."

The archive is also a time capsule of stamp collecting history, and Ronnei found this gem from 1959 particularly funny:

"SOMETHING FOR THE GIRLS: During the convention, there will be shopping tours of Detroit's leading stores, that is, unless the husbands object."

"We're indebted to Todd Ronnei for making this valuable resource available," said AFDCS President Lloyd de Vries. "We've already used this digital archive to settle a dispute."

The First Days Digital Archive is available online on this page.

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