The Largest Autograph Album & Travel Log Ever Assembled: The Great Book of Farmer Turned Globetrotter Joseph Mikulec, An Unprecedented Cultural and Political Survey of an Era, With the Contributions of the Famous and So Many Whose Stories Have Never Been Told

It was put together in an unmatched effort, unlikely ever to be rivaled

 

Mikulec traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, to every Continent except Antarctica, met tens of thousands who inscribed their thoughts and words to the world traveler, from world leaders to local merchants, from Theodore Roosevelt to the insurance salesman in Topeka to monarchs and leaders everywhere

 

Mikulec’s journey was made famous by four New York Times stories, reports by hundreds of local newspapers, and a silent movie clip shown in movie theaters all over the United States, among many other notices

 

 

This remarkable survey gives unique insight into the multicultural society of the United States at the end of its great period of immigration

 

It also captured the business world and the world of commerce and innovation during this important stretch

 

Mikulec visited at least 33 countries in his travels, and there are entries in 23 languages in the album

 

No person could contribute an autograph or note whom he had not personally met, which included six U.S. presidents, two monarchs and a prime minister of Great Britain, the president of China, leaders of Japan, Australia, India, Singapore, prime ministers of Canada, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Enrico Caruso, countless more

Josef Mikulec was born in a small town in northern Croatia on January 15, 1878. His father was a farmer and he worked that farm. Then his father, who had accrued debt, sent him to work off that debt on yet another farm. But before his 20th birthday, his burgeoning desire to see the world took his life in another direction. His father had refused his request to travel abroad, but he convinced his mother to let him. “I always wanted to see the world,” he would explain later. “This is the path I took to do that.” He traveled to Italy, then Malta, where he got a job.

He didn’t want to go home, and found an English steamboat on its way to South Africa; so he got aboard and sailed for 35 days to Port Elizabeth, in time to witness some of the rumblings of the Boer War. From there he sailed the Southern Atlantic Ocean to South America, camping in the rain forests, and visiting Buenos Aires. Shortly after that, as he told, he went to Brazil, living there for six months as a “savage.” He ate wild fruit, roots, and nuts, got lost in the rain forest, and almost died.

At some point, a Croation publishing group agreed to pay him $10,000 if he could walk around the world in 5 years. He was to give the publication exclusive rights to his story at the end of that time. “Mine is not a college education. I could neither read nor write when I left Croatia… but travel is the greatest educator,” he would elaborate.

It is not clear whether he honored his commitment to this group or whether they honored theirs to him. But what is clear is that the first 25,000 miles he walked were but a drop in the bucket of what would be a near lifetime of travel, which would earn him the nickname “The World Traveler.”

Along his journey, on one trip to Italy, he saw a young man carrying an autograph book and got the idea that he could document his trip with such a book himself. This he did. He had begun to get letters from people he met, attesting to his visit. These were now replaced with books that would later be bound together, each book containing a number of pages, with the final weighing nearly 60 pounds, with more than a thousand pages of autographs.

Really, his book was not an autograph book. It was much more. He was on search not of the signature but of the person, to meet face to face with the figure. No one could appear in his book unless he had personally met that person. In this process, he traveled in excess of 200,000 miles, wore out forty-four pairs of shoes, learned, by his own account, 8 languages, was the subject of an early silent newsreel, stepped foot on every habitable continent, sat down for interviews with nearly every major and many minor newspapers in a variety of languages, and met tens of thousands of people. The final count of signed notes in his book is more than 60,000.

This book went with him around the world. “I have no address,” he would say. “I spent last night in Newark. I don’t know where I shall spend tonight.”

It traveled, as a whole or in constituent parts, on pack mule, rickshaw, pushcart, boat, vessel, and finally in his Ford automobile, which he took up. Word of his arrival in this town or the other, or the latest port, preceded him. “I make friends with the captains of the ships they sendword on ahead to the port… When I arrive there the reporters and cinema men are waiting.”

Mikulec’s story was famous at the time. He was the subject of 4 pieces by the New York Times. In 1922, Pathe – a major film production company – featured him, his travels, and autographs, in a newsreel shown in virtually every movie theater in the United States, his adopted country.

He met Theodore Roosevelt 4 times, along with Warren G. Harding twice and 4 other Presidents. He lived as a native in the Brazilian rain forest, was in Johannesburg for the Boer War, was attacked from Native Americans in Yuma, Arizona, threatened with death a few times, and met incredible people all along the way.

At the end, the book was so heavy that it could only be pushed in a custom cart that more or less resembled a baby pram. Very few of these autographs were simple signatures; most were signed notes, with many even the length of letters written right into the book. And Mikulec had a fondness for official stamps and seals, obtaining from the officials he visited the seals of their nations, states, cities and more; plus stamps from the businesses that used them. The book’s final group of signatures is effectively late 1923.

The specifics are unprecedented. He visited all told at least 33 countries: In Europe, England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Netherlands, Yugoslavia, France, Poland, Ireland, and Switzerland. In Asia, Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, Palestine, Burma, India, and the Philippines. In the Americas, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, Uruguay, Argentina, and Costa Rica. In Australasia, Australia and New Zealand. In Africa, Egypt. We have identified at least 23 languages entered into the book: English, French, Italian, Yiddish, Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Spanish, Armenian, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Greek, Norwegian, Hungarian, Persian, Siamese, Portuguese, and Lithuanian.

Around this time, he met with great autograph dealer ASW Rosenbach, who said of his book that it was “the most complete collection of contemporary autographs” in existence.

As he approached his 50th birthday, he began to think about his legacy and also the legacy of the book. “This book is very precious and dear to me.” He set about bringing together the nearly 200 newspaper articles in several languages that he had collected and wrote stories alongside them of events that he remembered. He wrote the names of some of the people that he met, their addresses, and dates. Of these he created yet a second bound book, which he began in February 1924.

Provenance

Mikulec kept the books until 1925, when he sold them to Samuel Robinson. Robinson, an immigrant from Ireland, was a founding partner in the American Stores Company, the parent of Acme Markets. We obtained the book from a Robinson family descendant.

The 2 Books

There are over 1,000 pages in the main book, the pages of which are huge – 11 by 16 inches (the entirety is 10 inches thick) – and crammed full of handwriting on both sides of each page. They tell the story of a unique exploit, contain information from people great and obscure as they express themselves (sometimes at length), and show the world at Mikulec’s moment in time more thoroughly and compellingly than any history book. Nothing like it has ever come to market; this was thought lost for almost a century.

Mikulec described many of his very experiences in his second book from 1924. But he kept physical mementos in his great book as early as 1911. He traveled in 2 primary stretches, a break being necessitated because of the outbreak of World War I.

1911: Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, the Philippines

In early 1911, he went East, very far East. In May of 1911, Mikulec sailed for Australia, which was a jumping off point for him to go to New Zealand, whose cities were very young. He met Lord Islington, the Governor General of NZ, mayors and diplomats throughout that country, and visited Napier, New Plymouth, Wanganui, Christchurch and Wellington. From there, he traveled to Tasmania, visiting local figures and meeting, among many, Harry Baron, the Tasmanian Governor. He sailed back to Melbourne, Australia and traveled the East Coast, meeting Lord Denman, the Governor General of Australia.

The following month, in October, he traveled to the Philippines, where he met the Governor General, W. Cameron Forbes.

1911-1912: Japan, China, Singapore, Burma, India

By the Winter of 1911, he found himself in Japan with a military escort. He was active there and met the mayors of Nagasaki, Yokohama, Kobe, Fusajiro, and Yokohama. He met the US Ambassador there, Charles Page Bryan.

He was present for a speech by Admiral Togo and Admiral Saito Makoto, a great military leader and later Governor General and leader of South Korea. He met other military figures as well, in addition to academic figures and ordinary citizens. Some of these he met in July, during a trip to Manchuria and Shanghai, when he also met A. Roy. Knabenshue, a friend and supporter of the Wright Brothers and lead diplomatic presence in Asia.

From there he traveled to Hong Kong, meeting with the Governor there, FH May; also Li Yuan Huong, President of China and Hsi Liang, Viceroy of Manchuria, who wrote him a small poem. In addition to Shanghai, he was in Tiantsen and Peking.

In September, he was in Singapore, where he met Governor Arthur Young and in Burma the following month.

He ended 1912 in India, where he traveled to Calcutta, Delhi, and Agra, among other places. There he met OM Creagh, the Commander in Chief of India, and Administrator of India Malcolm Hailey. He met Lord Carmichael, Governor of Bengal and Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary (these last two he would meet later in the UK).

He had met many of the leading figures in the East in his first year.

1913 – the Middle East, Western Europe, a brief tour

In early 1913, he visited Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt and Jerusalem. In March and until the summer of 1913, he visited diplomats throughout Western Europe, visiting England, France, Germany, Denmark, Bohemia, Italy, Spain and Portugal. He bought the book around this time, inspired by vision of an Italian collecting autographs, and whereas until this point, the book consists of letters he received in person, applied to the book. From this point the signatures mainly appear on the pages of the book itself.

1914-1918 – World War I, a respite.

But as he did this, the war broke out. And we find him again in 1918 in the United States, based out of Philadelphia, bouncing up and down the East Coast.

The United States

1919-1922 – The Mid Atlantic; A political survey, in the United States and beyond

Beginning in early 1918, with a tour of New York, Connecticut, Philadelphia and Boston, Mikulec used the stretch from DC to Boston as a home base, traveling up and down this corridor and from there making trips out west and south. During these stretches, he visited politicians, diplomats, business owners, titans of industry, presidents, cabinet members, artists, most state governors, and other elected officials.

Among the presidential figures he visited and who contributed: U.S. Presidents and First Ladies: Theodore Roosevelt and Edith Kermit Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Edith Bolling Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover;

Other American political people appearing in the album include vice president Thomas Marshall, presidential nominees Charles Evans Hughes, Al Smith, and William Jennings Bryan, cabinet members William G. MacAdoo, Josephus Daniels, Robert Lansing, and Andrew Mellon.

Mikulec was equally fascinated by foreign relations and representatives, and he visited an untold number of ambassadors and consular officials, both in the United States and elsewhere. Just two examples are the French ambassador to the U.S , J.J. Jusserand, and the British ambassador in Washington, Edward Grey, famous for saying at the outbreak of World War I, “The lights are going out all over Europe and I doubt we will see them go on again in our lifetime”.

Some prominent military personnel made it into the album. These include Gen. John Pershing, ace Eddie Rickenbacker, Smedley D. Butler, most decorated U.S. Marine prior to WWII, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and Charles E. Stanton, famous for coining the memorable expression, “Lafayette, we are here!” in a speech he gave in Paris during the World War I.

A few other celebrities are physicist Michael Pupin, and Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

Mikulec visited literally thousands of businesses, from major corporations to small businesses of all kinds, from titans of industry to their employees, from the heads of major companies to the local market owner in a small town. A small representation: Andrew Carnegie; Thomas Edison; department store tycoons John Wanamaker and Bernard Gimbel; Jacob Ruppert, owner of the New York Yankees; stockbroker Charles Schwab; publisher George H. Putnam, founder Putnam’s; and presidents of Lloyds of London and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Mikulec also visited steamship companies, like the Cunard Lines.

He liked to visit factories, stores, car dealerships (like Packard Studebaker, and Cadillac), hotels (like the Waldorf Astoria, whose legendary chef Oscar has also signed), fraternal organizations, and banks (there are hundreds of bankers’ autographs). In these he would often meet with senior executives and their employees of every station.

He met leading figures in the cultural world, like Edward Robinson of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University president James Rowland Angell. He met boxers Jack Dempsey and Jess Willard, noted autograph collector ASW Rosenbach, and religious leaders like Cardinal James Gibbons.

The combined work of tens of thousands, a time capsule and people-wide survey of the end of the great period of immigration

In the U.S., the Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States. This album is a snapshot of the nation at the end of the great period of immigration, when between 1880 and 1924, more than 20 million immigrants arrived. The majority were from Southern, Eastern and Central Europe, and included 4 million Italians and 2 million Jews. Mikulec made it a point to visit these people at their shops, places of work, and amidst their activities. They contributed too. He emphasized this by visiting the newspapers that served these constituencies. He visited American newspapers published in English, but also those published in Italian, Yiddish, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Serbian, Czech, and Polish. Entries by these immigrants run into the thousands, and many – though by no means all – are in their native languages. For example, there are 36 entries in Yiddish, many quite lengthy, and many more in Italian and Eastern European languages.

He also met many leaders of the international business and banking communities, particularly in New York. One such example is Hisaakira Kano, an international banker and head of the Yokohama Specie Bank (YSB). The bank played a significant role in Japanese trade with China. For many years Kano was a Japanese representative Director at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Also: Ryoichiro Arai, a Japanese businessman who helped to build trade relationships between the United States and Japan, especially in the silk industry.

1919 – First Trip westward

In 1919, he reached out to the eastern Midwest, going from Philadelphia through Ohio and Michigan and ending in Indiana, collecting autographs of governors other prominent men and women along the way. He ended in Washington DC with a meeting with the Librarian of Congress.

1920 – Canada

His 1920 trip took him through upstate New York and into Canada. Here he met Canadian Prime Ministers Robert Borden and Arthur Meighen, and Prime Minister Devonshire, the Premier of Ontario and Governor General of Canada, as well as the Mayor of Toronto. This trip contains many other signatories in the business and political worlds. He would meet Gov. General Julian Byng in a 1921 trip to Montreal.

1920 – Iowa, Colorado, St. Louis and West Virginia

This trip saw him meet governors, politicians, and civic leaders from these states. He did so in Iowa City and Des Moines in Iowa; Ohama and Lincoln in Nebraska, Denver, Pueblo and Dodge City in Colorado; St. Louis and Kansas City in Missouri and a swing through Ohio and West Virginia heading home. There are many pages documenting this trip.

1921 – Trip to England from Canada

From Canada, Mikulec took a boat to Liverpool and then went on to London. He called on 10 Downing Street, residence of the prime minister, where he was hosted. And during his time in England, he met British Kings Edward VIII, King George VI, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George, along with his cabinet. He visited the major and minor businesses there and added to his book politicians and diplomats as well. He met with the head of the British Museum Sir Frederic George Kenyon.

1922 California, Texas, Florida and Cuba

The pages from these areas are also full of fascinating people, from prominent to less prominent.

Mikulec traveled through the Upper Midwest, before crossing into Canada, visiting Winnipeg and Calgary, gathering signatures of political and commercial leaders there. From there he saw the parks at Banff and headed to Vancouver, from which point he passed into Seattle and then to Portland, before heading south to Sacramento and San Francisco. He met the governor of California and many local leaders, before heading south to Los Angeles and Hollywood. He met many entertainment people, some in California and some in New York; we find silent film stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, William Farnum, and Tom Mix; opera legend Enrico Caruso; plus William Fox, founder of 20th Century Fox, future NBC leader David Sarnoff, noted producers Carl Laemmle and Brian Foy, and Eugene Zukor, executive with Famous Players Lasky, a musical quotation from conductor Leopold Stokowski. It is a fascinating snapshot in particular of the new movie industry. There are many movie executives represented at various points in the book.

From California, he traveled to El Paso, San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, AL, and Atlanta, meeting many people along the way.

This time, he did not head back home to rest. He went from Charleston, SC to Tampa FL, where he caught a boat to Havana, Cuba, meeting with dignitaries there, before returning to the US via Key West, Miami, Palm Beach, and Jacksonville.