The large autograph book assembled by Joseph Mikulec of Oroslavje, Croatia. Photo / Kaitlyn Dolan, the Washington Post
Viktor Šimunić snap-snapped the metal latches on the security case shut to keep the precious book safe. It takes two people to carry it.
About a foot (30cm) thick, the book is leather-bound and worn. The pages crackle, and it looks like a magical book of spells from a fairy tale.
It weighs about 60 pounds (27kg) and cost the small town that purchased it nearly a quarter of a million US dollars.
“It is history of that time,” said Šimunić, the Mayor of the Croatian town that bought the book. “And it is about a dream.”
It is the autograph book of Joseph Mikulec, a humble farmer who set off from the Croatian town of Oroslavje to see the world in 1901.
He became a global sensation, followed by news reporters, featured in newsreels and welcomed by dignitaries.
He visited at least 33 countries, travelling more than 200,000 miles (320,870km) - all on foot, with the book in tow: in a bag, on his shoulder, and eventually in its own custom-made stroller.
“Clad in a costume which looked like a combination of Alpine climber, football and bicycle garment, bearing on his back a stout knapsack, and in his sun-browned hand a heavy cudgel, he attracted attention wherever he went,” the Washington Post reported during one of his trips to DC in 1908.
Mikulec died in 1933, his story and his book largely forgotten over the past 100 years, until two things happened:
Šimunić, the 34-year-old Mayor of Oroslavje who travelled the world before returning to his hometown, heard about Mikulec from a local teacher two years ago.
He was riveted by the story, the élan and hubris of someone from his sleepy, 14th-century village.
Unbeknownst to Šimunić, across the Atlantic, a rare manuscript dealer named Nathan Raab was puzzling over the remarkable leather book held together with a thick leather horse strap, which a man had lugged into his Philadelphia office in 2021.
The man was a descendant of the ACME grocery magnate who bought it from Mikulec in 1925. Raab was unsure what exactly it was, but guessed it had a tremendous backstory.
Cracking open the well-worn spine revealed a time capsule.
“I take pleasure in giving this letter to Joseph F. Mikulec as evidence he called at the White House on this day,” says the February 1, 1915, entry by President Woodrow Wilson, one of six United States presidents who signed Mikulec’s book.
Mussolini, Ford, Tesla, Edison, King Edward VIII and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George were among 60,000 others who stopped whatever important business they were doing to sign the autograph book.
It became Mikulec’s life mission.
As he became increasingly famous, world leaders, artists and luminaries from Egypt to New Zealand (in 1911) were thrilled to sign what was becoming a global “Who’s Who”. Some wrote full letters and included stamps, seals and photos.
It was a time when metal detectors, gates and scanners didn’t separate the public from the prominent. Usually, all it took was Mikulec’s charisma to get past one grumpy guard.
“I walked up to 10 Downing Street, London, the other day,” Mikulec told the Evening Star in December 1919. He wanted to see Prime Minister David Lloyd George, but he was out and Mikulec left his book for him to sign.
“When I came back the autographs of most of the cabinet were in my book, and there were two photographers waiting to snap me on the way out,” he said.
Mikulec gave lectures, bringing the world to the people who shared his wanderlust.
He funded his adventures by charging admission to some of his story hours and selling postcards of himself to his legions of fans.
Mikulec once said a Croatian publishing company was going to pay him US$10,000 if he could walk around the world in five years and give them exclusive rights to his story. But there’s no evidence that materialised.
The truth was, he was his own remarkable hype man, alerting newspapers from New York to California whenever he was back in town with his massive book and quirky travelling clothes.
“I would say he was like an archetype of today’s influencer or travel blogger,” said Roberto Kuleš, president of Oroslavje’s city council and a member of the five-man delegation that travelled to the US East Coast last week to buy the book from Raab as part of a grand plan.
Mikulec travelled for so many years that his provenance changed with political history.
He was identified as an Austrian, a Croat and a “Jugoslavian” as he circled the globe three times.
He became a US citizen after living in Philadelphia for a few years when World War I disrupted his global travels.
Mikulec was born in 1878 to a poor farmer who lived near Oroslavje, a small town on the outskirts of Zagreb. He was expected to work in the fields. But he declared his wanderlust in his youth.
“In 1901, when he said, ‘I want to travel the world,’ he was like a lunatic,” said Šimunić, who saw some of himself in Mikulec.
The townsfolk told the dreamer: “You must get married. You must have children. You must stay home. You must work and be ordinary,” Šimunić said.
Mikulec managed to leave his family farm in 1901 to work in Italy and Malta. When his father died in 1905, the 27-year-old hopped on a steamboat to South Africa to begin a trip that would last nearly three decades.
From there, he went to South America, where he camped in rainforests and survived on wild fruit, roots and nuts. He was an outspoken vegetarian.
After his first visit to Washington, Mikulec crossed the US, lecturing at fire departments and town halls to anyone who wanted to hear about his adventures.
His lectures included “the tale of the snake that stabbed him near Matildas, of the Indian woman who pummelled him in Argentine, of Roosevelt and Wilson as they talked to him, of the bones of the whale on the Brazilian coast so enormous he could barely lift one rib, of Moros whose chests were so roughened by climbing shaggy trees that they looked like crocodiles,” the Detroit Free Press wrote in June 1919.
He was the Edwardian era’s Travel Channel, National Geographic, and travel TikTok.
“Mikulec appeared there in his tramping clothes, a red bandana around his neck and a big black thing under one arm,” a Washington journalist in Paris for the Evening Star reported when he spotted Mikulec in December 1921.
The city was on edge after a bomb exploded in the US Embassy there months earlier.
Officials at the embassy bolted at the sight of the man with a massive object wrapped in a black, waterproof covering under one arm, and “two French gendarmes appeared and led Mikulec away”, the Star reported. The massive object was the book.
There were actually three books in total - the other two much smaller.
One that had been with Mikulec’s distant family is on display in the Croatian History Museum in Zagreb, which acquired it in 2023.
Croatian historians had been buzzing at the news that the biggest book, the one presumed gone, surfaced in Philadelphia.
As Šimunić learned more about Mikulec’s story, he was inspired by the global impact a farmer from a small village had made.
He commissioned a statue of Mikulec with the book on his shoulder. And he longed to buy the biggest book, the famous one in Philadelphia.
He called Raab and asked for a digital copy of the pages.
“I told him, you don’t know me, I’m a little mayor from a little city,” he said. “But we have good intentions.”
Šimunić handily won his most recent election this summer, fuelled by the dream that he would bring the book back to Croatia and elevate the story of his hometown hero.
The US$225,000 to buy the book came out of the city budget. And not everyone there was happy about it, he said.
It was electrifying to finally see the book last week in Philadelphia, Šimunić said. Raab said he, too, was moved by the moment.
“It’s touching for us to know that it’s going back home,” he said in his company’s podcast episode about the book. “Where it belongs.”
Šimunić laid out his vision: “So, first step is the statue. Second step, we must buy the book. And after we buy the book, we can build the museum. That’s the real goal,” he said.
The museum would become a pilgrimage for travellers like Mikulec and an Instagram magnet for travellers like the young mayor, who set out to see as much of the world as he could before returning to his small town to run it.
“More than 200 mayors signed the book all around the world,” he said. “And my idea is, why not to contact today’s mayors? And ask them to visit?”
The Mikulec museum will have a replica of the book, but with the pages all blank, to be filled by the people who travel to Oroslavje.
“Mikulec went to see the world,” Šimunić said. “And now the world can come to Oroslavje to see his story.”