A book of autographs in Philly revives the legacy of a forgotten Croatian hero

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Joseph Mikulec was born in 1878 on a farm near the small town of Oroslavje in northern Croatia, where he developed a serious case of wanderlust.

Mikulec left Croatia and spent his life traveling around the world by foot, assembling the world’s largest collection of signatures.

He died in 1933. His autograph book sat in a private collection in Philadelphia for almost a century.

Now it is finally going home to Oroslavje.

Born to run

In his 20s, supposedly without the ability to read or write, Mikulec gallivanted through Europe and South Africa, attracting the attention of a Croatian publishing company that promised him $10,000 if he would walk around the Earth, approximately 25,000 miles as the crow flies, and write about his stunt.

That book never happened, but it spurred another, perhaps more interesting book — after a lifetime spent walking the equivalent of eight times around the world, Mikulec assembled a gigantic tome about 8 inches thick, weighing 60 pounds and containing an estimated 60,000 signatures.

“The breadth is incredible. You could not accomplish what he accomplished,” said Nathan Raab, an Ardmore-based dealer of historic documents and signatures.

“He wasn’t calling an Uber. He was walking around carrying that thing on his shoulders,” he said. “He went all over the world. He went to New Zealand at a time when there couldn’t have been more than a handful of people living in New Zealand.”

In 1910, about a million people lived in New Zealand. Mikulec not only convinced the island nation’s governor-general, Lord Islington, to sign his book, but also several sheep farmers, New Zealand’s chief industry at the time.

Backstreets

Mikulec had a knack for gaining an audience with very powerful people. The book has the signatures of six U.S. presidents, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, King Edward VIII, who later famously abdicated the throne, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and opera singer Enrico Caruso.

It may be the only place where two bitter rivals unwittingly contributed to the same book: inventors Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, also a native of Croatia.

Mikulec was just as interested in getting signatures of lesser-known people. While in Montreal in 1921, he stopped into the Slavonian Emigration Company to get the signature of one Josef Dombrowski. On the facing is the signature of Canadian Prime Minister Arthur Meighen, who noted his “appreciation of your tenacity.”

While in Washington, D.C. in 1919, Mikulec acquired the signatures of the ambassador for the king of Spain, Don Juan Riano y Gayangos; the clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court, James D. Maher; and a manager of the Remington Typewriter Company, M.J. McNally.

“He didn’t just go to presidents and kings,” Raab said. “It was very impressive he was able to get audiences with those people, but he got autographs from the insurance salesman down the road, the owner of the shop, the local businessman.”

My hometown

Perpetually hard up for money, toward the end of his life, Mikulec sold the autograph book to Philadelphia businessman Samuel Robinson, whose grocery store chain would later become ACME Markets. The book stayed in the family for nearly a century, until they recently sold it to Raab.

Now Croatia is taking it back.

“We must bring it home,” said Viktor Šimunić, the mayor of Oroslavje. On behalf of the town, he bought the book from Raab for nearly a quarter-million dollars. Last week, he came to Ardmore, Pennsylvania, to pick up his prize.

“We saw this as an opportunity for our city, for tourism,” he said. “This is not only city heritage. It’s national.”

Šimunić plans to build a museum in Oroslavje to honor a man he only learned about a couple of years ago, whom he now regards as a national hero.

Lucky town

In his day, Mikulec was a rabid self-promoter. Whenever he arrived in a town, the first thing he would do was go to the local paper and try to get some press for his eccentric project. Most of the time, he got it. Šimunić says he has over 800 press clippings about Mikulec and his book.

Mikulec was also featured in silent film newsreels. In 1922, he showed off his book of signatures in a Pathé reel, sandwiched between a segment about the election of Pope Pius XI and shots of the U.S. secretary of state taking a Caribbean vacation.

Some found Mikulec’s self-promotional antics annoying. A recent article in the Smithsonian Magazine cites a newspaper reporter in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, circa 1914, relieved that the outbreak of World War I had curtailed Mikulec’s travels: “At least Mr. Mikulec will not get to Lancaster and pester us for free advertising about his remarkable but foolish performances.”

But to Croatians living in America, Mikulec was a hero.

“When Croatian newspapers wrote, every time they say, ‘Our big Croatian guy,’”  Šimunić said. “Every Croatian in America knew our Joseph Mikulec.”

But his fame was fleeting. Šimunić admits that, until Raab put the book up for sale in 2022, he had never heard of Mikulec. Since then, he has wasted no time building a national hero. Last year, his town erected a statue of Mikulec, and now the autograph book will be the centerpiece of a planned museum.

The 34-year-old mayor calls Mikulec the world’s first “influencer.”

“This book is like Facebook of that century,” Šimunić said. “People wrote messages. If people were artists, they draw. If a musician, make some notes and songs. It is very similar like today.”

Mikulec did not fill the entire book. Its last several dozen pages are blank. Šimunić is hoping to carry forward Mikulec’s international vision by asking current mayors of major American cities to sign the historic book, including Cherelle Parker in Philadelphia and the mayor of New York City.