Seeking Zanzibar

An email from a childhood friend, who has an excellent memory but also a tendency to fantasize, recently accused me of having gloated, in my childhood, over my collection of Zanzibar triangle-shaped postage stamps.  After a frantic search -- was my old stamp album lost? had it been stolen? -- I finally located it in an unexpected upstairs bookcase. 

The old stamp album!  When I was ten, my mother returned from a trip to Chicago, bearing this album and an envelope of 500 or so mixed postage stamps as a peace offering.  I spent days sorting out those hundreds of stamps from all nations, trying to figure out which country they were from.  Deutsch Post, Magyar kir Posta, Ceskoslovensko, Helvetia, Poczta Polska.  I hardly even knew where Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Poland were on the map -- let alone their names for themselves.  But I matched stamps with the blurry photographs in my album.

I learned a lot of geography, a lot of foreign currency denominations, and even some foreign language expressions before my eleventh birthday.

Looking back at that album today, copyright 1950, I see spaces for stamps from a lot of entities that had been almost forgotten even then.  Pre-unification German states.  British colonies.  "Italian East Africa."  Danzig.  Cyrenaica.  Angra. (?) Aguera. (??)  And one country -- Central Lithuania -- that merited a full page for quite a variety of stamps.  That last one stumped me even today, and I had to resort to Wikipedia.  Central Lithuania existed -- unrecognized by most countries and the League of Nations, but prolifically churning out postage stamps, between 1920 and 1922 -- as a sort of buffer between resurgent Poland and resurgent Lithuania. 

It's all there in my album.  The powerful and the weak, the nations that have lasted centuries and those that lasted but a few months (who but a kid who collected stamps remembers Tannu Tuva?).  The series of stamps with Hitler and the far more beautiful series with Pope Pius XII.  Stamp collecting was insidious, the way it educated young minds without their being aware of it -- sneakily inducing them to learn while loving it, without even recognizing that they were learning.

But Zanzibar?  Nope.  I never added a stamp to my album's Zanzibar section, never owned a Zanzibar stamp.  And Zanzibar doesn't seem to have been one of those progressive states that printed multi-colored stamps in odd shapes and sizes as enticements to young collectors.  (Such as San Marino?  Costa Rica?  French Somali Coast?  Even the Vatican?)  Zanzibar's stamps -- at least as illustrated in my album --all had bearded, grumpy-appearing heads, topped by fezes.  Zanzibar's sultans may already have suspected that the day was coming when they would be the subject of an acquisition and merger by enormous Tanganyika across the straits.

Never been to Zanzibar.  Never even seen any of its stamps.  But I'd jump at the chance to visit.