Dragon Cards were conceived with two ideas in mind: One, in emulation of the Sanders Cards of the 1940s and 1950s, and two, because servicing picture postcards as maximum cards was a pain: Neither the stamps nor cancellation inks stuck to the picture sides unless the postcards were defaced. The cards were reduced to #6¾-envelope size in 1988 because several major FDC dealers said they wouldn't stock them because they didn't fit in their standard-size cover boxes. After we reduced the size, these same dealers said they wouldn't stock them because they were cards, not envelopes. At this point, we said several choice words, went back to 5"x7", and have not sought dealer accounts since that time. The art for the Metropolitan Opera card came from a Met brochure picked up at Lincoln Center. It cost $15 just to have the title typeset and another $15 (I think) to have the photo screened so it could be printed. The company that did the typesetting for the early Dragon Cards also did the typesetting for the ads selling those "How To Attract Women" ads that used to run in men's magazines in the late 1970s/early 1980s. The printer apparently had trouble getting the dark brown color for the Metropolitan Opera card just right, because he delivered about 100 more cards than the 300 we requested. We don't know how many we serviced, but we had Great Expectations, so we just kept buying more and more stamps. It seemed like a good idea at the time. There's no Dragon logo on the Duke Ellington card because it was placed half an inch too low. The choice was to make the card 5"x7½" or keep it the intended 5"x7". Can we lay claim to the first cachet designed on a computer? Probably not, but the entire design for Dgn 35 Basketball (1991) — text and graphic — was produced on an Apple IIgs with a dot matrix printer. Every Dragon Card but two has been produced by a commercial print shop. The major exception was Joe Louis (Dgn 39), which was done by feeding the cardstock through an office photocopier. It was such an unpleasant experience that we never attempted it again... ...except that there were so few copies of the United We Stand Unofficial (21 of Dgn 122), and the cards were already cut, making them hard for our commercial printer to handle, that we hand-fed them through a color inkjet printer. Four were fed backwards, of course. Dragon Cards have been produced in every year since 1983, with the exception of 1992. Why none in 1992? I don't recall, except it was the final year of my attempt to be a big-time weekend bourse dealer, and I was probably so depressed at that point and short of cash that I just didn't get around to any issues. As it was, I only started selling the other stuff (unusual FDCs) because "everyone" said I couldn't only sell Dragon Cards; pretty soon the tail was wagging the dog, and the other stuff became more important than Dragon Cards. By 1992, I decided to give up the bourses, liquidated the other stuff in James T. McCusker's first auction, and kept going with Dragon Cards.
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