Canadian First Day Covers by Artopages

Gary Dickinson
Released October 2021.
62 pages, 8.5"x11", spiral bound.
Colour C$ 27.00 [ISBN 978-1-989280-27-0].

Between 1967 and 1976, beginning with the Canadian Flag stamp of January 1967 and the Centennials and continuing until the Montreal Olympics stamps of 1976, a partnership of an artist / designer and an entrepreneur interested in first day covers who had a small printing press in his basement combined to produce 245 different First Day Covers for Canadian stamps of the period. The company was called Artopage Covers. Many of the FDCs featured the same stamp, but with colour differences in the FDC design.

Dr. Gary Dickinson worked in British Columbia secondary schools, colleges, and universities for thirty-five years until he retired in 2000. The last twenty years were at Okanagan College and Okanagan University College in Kelowna where he served as South Okanagan Regional Director for five years and Dean of the Faculty of Adult and Continuing Education for fifteen years. He was also Academic Vice-President for the two years prior to his retirement.

After his retirement, Dickinson continued his interest in continuing education by serving as a founder and President of the Society for Learning in Retirement, a six hundred member organization providing educational programs for seniors in the Central Okanagan, chairing the Okanagan College Central Okanagan Advisory Committee, and serving on that institution’s Research Ethics Board. Gary and his wife Barbara have six grown children and were foster parents for twenty years.

Although his participation in philately was on an occasional basis since early youth, the hobby became a more serious avocation after he retired. He gradually redefined his area of interest as writing about first day covers rather than just collecting them, and he has published more than three hundred articles in such periodicals as First Days, Canadian Stamp News, BNA Topics, Stamp Insider Online, First Impressions, and others as well as fifteen previous handbooks in a series published by the British North America Philatelic Society. He served as editor of the BNAPS FDC Study Group newsletter, First Impressions, from 2011 to 2018.