Look! What exotic writing!

Can someone please tell me why we still have passport books with 20-odd pages in them? There’s really only one page that “counts”, the one with your photo and passport number on it. The rest of the pages are blank, left to be filled up with stamps from various countries. I used to be quite proud of my last passport book, as it had stamps from all over Europe and most of East Asia. In fact, I actually filled the book.

I am confident in guessing that the concept of a passport book arose out of 19th century British Empire or French Departmental bureaucracy. Before passport books, men carried “letters of writ” with embossed blobs of wax stamped with seals on them. This format doesn’t stand up well, so a specific book was a great leap forward. But given that entry into any given country is now done by electronic lookup, a modern passport really only requires the one page with my photo and the embedded RFID chip. When Japan lets me enter as a spouse of a Japanese National, they know exactly who I am and who my wife is. Why do I need a stamp that says so? When China granted me a multi-year multi-entry visa, they gave me a nice shiny sticker that takes up a whole page, but I am pretty sure this is for my benefit– certainly the records of my visa are in their immigration computers, right? This would be true for any country that grants specific visas for entry: they really only need my name ans unique passport number to look up my records. If anything, the sticker is there just to make me feel good and see something tangible in my little book of stamps and stickers.

There are two options I can think of to keep the passport book-and-stamp format:

1. It’s there for people without a computerized lookup method handy
2. It’s a graphic cypher, with those immigration officials stamping my little book at odd angles that only they can read properly (if I tried to stamp my own book, I would get the angle wrong, and I would get busted)

Neither of these theories hold water, however:

1. Anyone who doesn’t have computerized access to immigration records and permissions has no right looking at my passport. Am I the only one that gets bothered when hotel clerks ask for my passport and write down my information? Who the hell are they?
2. Any sort of graphic cypher would need a key, with some way to transmit that key from the writer (stamper) to the reader (the next immigration official reading that stamp some months later). No way. It’s a hand stamp, and a poorly-inked one at that.

I’m pretty sure the passport book is a hold-over to a more romantic era of travel, much like those stickers that our parents put on their luggage, and we used to collect kitchen magnets. I would bet (hope) that pretty soon it will all be in the the cloud, and we’ll merely collect Foursquare badges.