History of Anon E Mouse Cachets

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The Evolution of Anon E Mouse Cachets

Collectors are often curious about creative steps in the cachet production process. Exhibitors want to know something about the person who made the covers they display. Scholars of FDC history also appreciate details about cachets and the people who made them.

I began making cachets for first day covers in 1981. Cachet making has been an avocation, squeezed in between more pressing life events. Over the past thirty-eight years I have produced 382 different Anon E Mouse designs. This page tells how my designs and reproduction methods evolved.

How to Make More Than One

Here are my earliest reproduction methods, in the order I began using them. All still required hand coloring with pencils. Linked words take you to a three-page PDF document that illustrates samples and describes the process.

Loafpan Light. Tracing with a light box. home-made lightbox

Traced the original by pressing on carbon paper, First Cachets
Traced the original over a loaf pan and night light, Desert Cacti
Traced the orginal over a home-made wooden light box, Two Presidents
Photocopied black and white drawings, Legends of American Music

2022 Edition of "How Now Brown Mouse"

Here is a revised and updated version of a retrospective exhibit explaining the evolution of Anon E. Mouse cachets. The entire 80 pages have been scanned to PDF format. They are in five separate files, one for each 16-page frame.

Original "How Now Brown Mouse"

These are the original exhibit pages taken to the AMERICOVER stamp show hosted by the American First Day Cover Society in 1999, and again (with a few changes) in 2006.