A passport’s life – A Luxury Travel Blog : A Luxury Travel Blog

I am an obsessive collector. At ten, I started collecting postage stamps, fascinated by the colorful, miniature designs and illustrations. By twelve, I was also collecting stickers; Hello Kitty, Miffy, scratch ‘n’ sniff, sparkly, and those satisfyingly tactile, puffy ones.

When I moved to NYC in my early 20s, I began to collect matchbooks, which held the same fascination as those long ago stamps. I marveled at the tiny advertisements for the restaurants they represented. I collected the annual NYC Zagat dining guides, and enthusiastically ticked off the places where I had eaten.

A decade later, I moved to Japan, where I started to collect meishi, (business cards). The intricate kanji, katakana, and hiragana strokes were, in themselves, individual works of art— typography that complimented the Japanese design aesthetic beautifully.

Over subsequent years of travel, I found more to…