Word: guianas
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James A. Mackay. 296 pages. Macmillan. $17.50. The rich vagaries of stamp collecting go on and on as prices rise and the hobby cum investment spreads. In 1970, $280,000 was paid for a One-Cent Black on Magenta of British Guiana 1856: "a square inch of paper, with dogeared corners, a smudgy post mark and a badly rubbed surface." Author Mackay is the former keeper of stamps at the British Museum. He has produced a remarkably documented thumbnail history of some 3,000 stamps dating from 1840 to the present, with slightly enlarged color illustrations...
Died. Henri Charrière, 67, alias "Papillon" (Butterfly), whose 1969 book of the same name chronicled his nine hair-raising escape attempts from France's antiquated dungeons in French Guiana; of throat cancer; in Madrid. Charrière, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1931 for murder, finally broke out of Devil's Island in 1941 and found asylum in Caracas, where he became a gold prospector, shrimp fisherman, bar owner and eventually a best-selling author, with 14 million book sales worldwide...
...before it is finished. The $500 million, 9,000-mile highway network will provide the first land link between Brazil's Atlantic seaboard ports of Belem and Recife and the Bolivian and Peruvian borders-and perhaps eventually the Pacific. Other roads will reach out to Surinam, French Guiana, Colombia and Venezuela to the north, and to Brazil's industrialized states in the south...
...suave breaker of hearts and a slick cracker of safes. Suddenly, he is framed for a murder he did not commit and sentenced to prison for life-or "perpetuity" as the French, knowing their own penal system, more realistically put it. Shuffled off to French Guiana, he tries to break out nine times. On the first escape, he makes it 1,800 miles to Colombia in an open boat, staying free for eleven months before being caught and returned to the penal colony...
...named Henri Charrière, who manages to resemble both the late Robert Benchley and not-so-early George Raft, Papillon the man has turned up in Paris to promote Papillon the book. He is photographed with Brigitte Bardot. For Paris Match, he revisits French Guiana and poses in the crumbling cells of the now abandoned penal colony. "Would you like to come back to France for good?" a reporter asks him. "France is my blood," says Papillon, with that terse flair that never seems to desert him. "Venezuela is my heaven." Two books are written attacking Papillon. One claims...