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 (A global time capsule, the combined work of tens of thousands of people worldwide and in the United States, unearthed after a century, never before researched or offered publicly for sale)

Americana|Theodore Roosevelt|Calvin Coolidge|Warren Harding|Thomas Edison|Joseph Mikulec

Beschreibung

Signed by Edison and Tesla in the same book, likely the only such piece ever to reach the market?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, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Enrico Caruso, countless morehttps://vimeo.com/1026686442?share=copy?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 a.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 23184

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: 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 (A global time capsule, the combined work of tens of thousands of people worldwide and in the United States, unearthed after a century, never before researched or offered publicly for sale)
• Einband: Hardcover