A Pain Vast and Personal, Writ Small

"Stamps are not just a reduction of a larger image," she said. "It becomes a new iconic image itself."

Kessler, who is known as the stamp lady at the Arlington Road post office, doesn't come up with the subjects for her stamps.

A citizens advisory panel decides who and what will be honored on our envelopes each year. Kessler's job is to take those topics, which can be things as varied as Irving Berlin and America's national parks, and figure how to make them work in thumbnail dimensions.

Her first step is to research the topic, seeking to understand the subject well enough to boil it down to its essence. For Alzheimer's, she contacted the National Institutes of Health, various advocacy groups and some of her friends who have parents suffering from the disease.

For a series on moviemaking, she found or made photographs that encapsulated each of the highlighted roles: for directing, a shot of John Cassavetes peering through a frame of his thumbs; for screenwriting, a few typescript words ("Scarlett: I can't think about that now . . . ").

When Kessler finally hit upon her idea for the Alzheimer's design, she asked New York artist Matt Mahurin to draw the portrait. He used his aunt as a model and his wife's hand as the caregiver's.

"He was nearly perfect on the first sketch he sent," Kessler said. "That's part of my job: knowing of virtually every artist and illustrator out there."

Kessler also created the 1998 breast cancer awareness stamp, the first stamp used to raise funds for an outside cause (and one of the rare stamps released at a White House ceremony, which Kessler attended with her mother). It was another personal issue for the designer, who won her battle with breast cancer in 1994.

The Postal Service has sold more than 1 billion of the breast cancer stamps, and those, plus her many other tiny works, surely make Kessler one of the best-selling designers of all time.

Her work is widely available and currently sells for 42 cents apiece.