GENEVA - Heligoland, Horta, Italian Somalialand, Karelia, Kionga, Labuan, Lubeck, Marienwerder, Mayotte, Memel, Modena, Moheli, Niger Coast Protectorate, Nossi Be, Ingermanland, Nyasaland, Penrhrn Island, Rouad, Stellaland, Two Sicilies, Upper Silesia, White Russia, Wallis and Futuna Islands, Wurtemberg, Great Britain -- Offices in the Turkish Empire
-- Pages in "The Modern Postage Stamp Album" (1925)
As a child, I was always fascinated with the idea of taking a Rorschach test -- the notion someone could divine my personality in response to my perception of inkblots -- until a good friend of my mother quipped: "Don't bother. All you will see is the outline of countries."
To be sure, I have fancied myself a geography buff for years, cluttering my life with drawers full of old road maps and spending my bedtime reading hours with railway guides or plane schedules.
With railway guides in hand, I am forever (in my mind) switching trains in Teschen, boarding tramp steamers in Genoa for the Sardinian coast or calculating where the rail gauge changes from narrow to standard between Hanoi and Kunming.
A lot of this geographic smugness, so to speak, ran off the rails when the best-selling historian and travel writer, Simon Winchester, recently came to my house for a visit. His latest book, "The Man Who Loved China," about Joseph Needham, caused him to make long car drives in China, just as his book "Outposts," a trip among the remaining British colonies, involved sailboats, sampans, dune buggies, ferries and night buses.
Whenever Simon and I get together -- we became friends in the 1970s -- the subjects are invariably travel and how to get somewhere. Simon is one of the few people I know I can ask about the Chinese Eastern Railway (Irkutsk to Vladivostok across Manchuria in the early 20th century, and the cause, in my view, of several big wars).
His answers come back with detailed descriptions of the Shenyang (formerly Mukden) railroad station, or advice on how to catch the train to Dandong, on the Yalu River where the tracks in China cross into North Korea.
On his last visit, as we were discussing ferry service out of Port Arthur (actually, he corrected me, the boats go from Dalian), he mentioned his passion for stamp collecting. That prompted me, in turn, to take down from the shelf my father's boyhood stamp album, now kept by my youngest son, Charles, who is 13.
My father is 90, and as a boy he pasted down hundreds of stamps on pages titled "Sandwich Islands," "Portuguese Congo," "Orange River Colony" and "Schleswig-Holstein." Some of the stamps date to the late 19th century, when his own grandfather was collecting, and it was these early stamps that I had wanted Simon to see. Carefully, we turned the brittle pages in the album that outlines the known world, at least for stamp collectors, in 1925.
I consider Simon my most-traveled friend. As well, I take some personal pride in having tarried in Okinawa, Pakistan, Bosnia and Mongolia. But both of us drew blanks as the pages of the stamp album unfolded around such names as Horta, Labuan, Mayotte and Rouad.
We both knew Heligoland as the German promontory in the North Sea, and Karelia as being near the Finland Station. Nyasaland, we figured out, is present-day Malawi. But we were clueless about such stamp issuers as Inhambane (now in southern Mozambique), Nossi-Be (an island near Madagascar), Obock (the port in Djibouti), Ponta Delgada (Azores) and Tete (on the Zambezi River). In 1925, 6-year-old boys, like my father, knew more of the world than do frequent-flying travel writers today.
After Simon left, I quietly sat with the Internet and my World Gazetteer (a dictionary of places) and tracked down the likes of Horta (in the Azores) and Labuan (an island of East Malaysia). Mayotte, off the African east coast, was an easy find, as it has just voted to reunite with France, and Rouad I found offshore from Syria. I still haven't confirmed Kiaucho (Shantung in China?) or those "offices in the Turkish Empire." Niger Coast Protectorate sounds suspiciously like an early oil-drilling concession.
The longer I spent searching in the atlas, tracking down postal entrepots, the more I began to equate stamp issuance in the 1920s with the causes of war or unrest 10 or even 50 years later. In the early days of World War II, places like Memel, Marienwerder, Heligoland and Upper Silesia went from stamp collecting to Nazi occupation, as if Adolf Hitler was in pursuit of first issues, not simply lebensraum.
As well, names like Nyasa Protectorate, Italian Somaliland, White Russia and Stellaland speak to me about failed peace treaties or colonial dissolution, as if they were returned to their senders for insufficient postage.
My father worries that, with the rise of e-mail, cell phones and instant messaging, collecting stamps will become a lost art. (I have found him trying to soak the self-adhesive off the back of modern stamps.) He is forever badgering traveling friends to bring back stamps from Burkina Faso and Sabah, although, to be accurate, he might refer to them as Upper Volta and North Borneo.
Sometimes in my travels I have tried to find a new stamp album for my son, hoping that it might have pages for Montenegro, Birobijan (an autonomous Jewish republic in Russia), Kyrgyzstan, Kosovo, Macau, Palau, Bashkortostan (also in Russia) or Republika Srpska. Instead, I meet clerks who tell me that global albums no longer exist, and that my son's career in philately will only move forward if he specializes, for example, in the birds of the Comoro Islands.
I doubt that anyone collecting stamps in the '30s thought that he needed to specialize. That was an era when such notables as Franklin Roosevelt were celebrated, in small part, because of their devotion to stamp collecting, and that meant having albums that literally circled the world.
When FDR was first elected president, in 1932, he politely asked the State Department to save all the stamps that it received, and he spent many of his Saturdays at ease with his albums. When the world crisis began later in the decade, he didn't need his aides to tell him where the Saar, the British Solomons or Danzig were. All he had to do was look in his books.
(Matthew Stevenson is the author of travel books, including "An April Across America." For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.)
The Stamp Atlas
Philatelic Atlas of the Bechuanalands and Botswana
