Booklets Offer More

Travel the world on the magic carpets of philately. Stamp booklets take you back in time, reveal facts about historical events, shed light on cultural activities and help you learn about everyday living in distant lands. Booklets arouse your passion about current and past world activities, facts you might never have known but will enrich your life. The booklets start the journey.

As you explore the many paths of your journey you increase your knowledge and knowledge brings happiness. Modern communications, the internet, and easily found archival data in newspapers and libraries allow you to soar wherever you wish without leaving your local area.

Those tiny pieces of paper called stamps contain clues about the past. Look at stamps and you will learn about famous people, geography, and national events. You will be able to trace the advance of technology. You can learn about daily life, the cartoons that entertained people, or propaganda that shaped opinions, or art, or flowers, or animals, or… just about anything.

Whatever inspiration stamps provide, stamp booklets arouse your spirits and curiosity many times over. They contain much more information than stamps simply because the interleaves and covers have more space for messages and pictures that stir the imagination. Look at the cover of this Australian Antarctic Territory booklet (Figure 1, Ed: The item is actually a folder from a souvenir stamp pack.). The images evoke feelings of the exotic natural treasures to be found there and some of the ways (sailing ship, plane, dog sled, all terrain vehicle) in which they can be explored. The stamps inside the booklet show colourful indigenous birds. They are pretty, but the covers offer a panorama of the glory and romance of the Antarctic. Contemplate this booklet for awhile and you wish you could roam the Antarctic without freezing. Technology lets you do it. You can find maps, pictures, weather data, stories of expeditions, astronomical phenomena, birds, animals, and fish. You can also learn about the history of, and the future for the continent with a minimum of effort.

This article shows how you can travel vicariously. I will do this by example; by using a stamp booklet that caused me to ask questions to learn about things I didn’t know and how to find the information.

Where to begin? In the example which follows, the item that stirred me to action was an advertisement on an interleaf in an East African stamp booklet issued in 1956 (Figure 2 above). The stamps are interesting but other parts of the booklet were more so. In particular, I refer to the advertisement for the Avenue Hotel. It is the brevity of the printed words that aroused my interest. The individual who decided to write this minimal copy was confident that no address or telephone number was needed, that anyone who wanted to stay at the Avenue Hotel would know where it was and how to find it. (There are three other notices in this booklet without addresses. It seems that was an acceptable way to advertise.) The goal of any advertiser is to entice people to use the product. I wonder if someone who bought this stamp booklet would have chosen this hotel because of this advertisement. The advertiser presented an uncluttered page and used lots of white space so that the message he wanted to convey was unlikely to be overlooked.

Even though I have not visited Nairobi, my at-home searches have changed my perspective. I thought Nairobi was a city of 50,000. But in 1956, the population was about 200,000. Fifty years later the city is a thriving metropolis with over ten times that many people.

The stamps inside this booklet were valid in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika, often abbreviated as K. U. T. (Kenya and Uganda still exist as separate countries but, in 1964, Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to become Tanzania.) What influence did this advertisement have on a postal patron in Kampala, Uganda? Who were the guests of the Avenue Hotel? East Africa was part of the British Empire. Were the guests mainly businessmen and tourists from afar? I doubt that many natives stayed there. Their average wage was too low. Even today the average income is $350 to $400 per capita per year.

My first attempt to find out about the hotel was to browse the internet using the search words “Avenue Hotel, Nairobi.” The only result was a listing on eBay offering a luggage tag from the hotel. This only increased my interest because I couldn’t imagine that a 50 year old luggage tag would be considered a saleable item unless the hotel was very well known. I bought it and believed it was a reproduction because it hadn’t any gum on the back. This excited me further since that meant that the hotel was so famous that its memorabilia were worthy of reproduction.

I then searched the Nairobi hotel web sites but the Avenue Hotel wasn’t listed. I thought of e–mailing all the hotels to see if they had once been called The Avenue Hotel. Perhaps it was under new ownership and had been renamed. I didn’t do that but if I had, I would have excluded large hotels like the Hilton and InterContinental because they were built since the fifties.

Instead, I queried the Library of Congress (LoC) in Washington, DC. The reply to my e-mail took three weeks but the answer included three web sites with information about the hotel. Two of the sites contained pictures, and one of the sites was a series of informative biographies of people who had lived in Kenya. One of the biographies mentioned that his mother had been a Manager at the Avenue Hotel in the 1950’s. I also searched through the other pictures on the web site and found many interesting views of Nairobi and surrounding areas including a larger picture of the Avenue Hotel than the one the LoC mentioned. In addition, the person at the Library of Congress told me about a visit she had with two people from Nairobi and what they told her about the hotel. She also told me that the hotel is now an office building. I continue to pursue her leads in an effort to obtain answers to the questions I posed above.

The mechanics of the investigatory process are easy. There has been a communications explosion. Computers provide worldwide access to people, libraries, museums, newspapers, magazines, tourist bureaus, government agencies, almanacs, trade associations, and encyclopedias. If you want names, addresses, and telephone numbers of sources of information, there are many books in any library about how to do research which can tell you where to find what you need. The nice thing about digging for facts is that if one source ignores you, there are other ways to uncover the information. And, if you can’t find it on your own, you can generally find someone who is willing to find it for you.

A book that you may find useful is, The Modern Researcher by Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff. The first edition appeared about 35 years ago. The latest is a 2003 edition. It describes the techniques of research and effective writing and speaking. Other books can be found on the internet. Using the search words How to do Research I found 506 books at Barnes and Noble and 1395 books at Amazon. Many of these books are specialized and concern researching topics about baseball, the Civil War, politics, anthropology, biology, geography, etc. It appears you can find a useful book specifically addressed to your field.

Even though you can conduct most of your research at leisure from your home you will still undergo rejection and frustration when you have to depend on others. Often people take a long time to respond. Their priorities are not the same as yours and they do have other duties. Sometimes they don’t respond at all. You need patience.

You must be imaginative and creative so that you can find the sources for the information you seek. Above all you need perseverance. If people don’t respond or only give cursory answers, you have to be willing to query them again and again. Always be polite. Some people don’t respond even though you think that is their job. People in customer service or public relations will usually return the call, but sometimes they don’t. Facts are not always in the form you want. You will have to extrapolate, calculate, and massage the data to arrive at the facts you seek. If you are tolerant, persistent, polite, and innovative you will get the details you want. If you are willing to spend time and effort, and a modest amount of money, you will succeed in your quest. The process is not difficult but you need to persevere, be patient and always seek alternate approaches.

Physically, visiting places is desirable but not always possible. A postal history enthusiast I know investigated the life of Robert Morris, a signer of both the U. S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. He went to Morrisville, NJ which is less than 50 miles from where he lives, took pictures, talked with people, visited the local sites, spent time in the historical society offices, and then published an article. Besides spending some pleasurable days in Morrisville, he was rewarded with loads of interesting information and meeting some friendly people.

Someone else I knew was immensely interested in the various postal cancellations of Iceland. He visited Iceland, travelled to the many post offices, He too published an article.

The first person went to Morrisville for the sole purpose of finding out about Robert Morris. The second person was planning an overseas trip and decided that going to Iceland, while pleasurable on its own merits, would become more enjoyable if he combined his lust for travel with furthering his knowledge about his philatelic specialty.

Perhaps your interest is in outer space. The booklet pictured in Figure 3 (left) from The Gambia unfolds like an accordion to show the Apollo 11 orbit around the earth and moon along with the stamps. Building on the text and pictures in the booklet will help you learn about the operation of tracking stations around the globe, vicariously walk on the moon with the astronauts, contemplate theories about space flight, or possibly probe into the lives and times of the people who made the exploration of space possible. There are many other stamp booklets regaling the adventures of space exploration. You are not likely to go there but you can take a virtual space journey.