From Brian Smith
After your review published last autumn of Jessica Helfand’s excellent book on wheel charts, I started collecting them (28 September, p 53).
On both French and German eBay (I am British, live in Germany and work in France—don’t ask!), when I tried to buy from American sellers one of several Boy Scout semaphore and signalling disks, dating from around 1914, up popped a screen telling me that for security or other reasons, the sale was prohibited to certain other countries.
So I wonder: is the problem the Boy Scouts, or the semaphore? Or perhaps the Iraqi equivalent of Boy Scouts have undeclared semaphore flags and illegally imported supplies of dots and dashes?
Berlin, Germany
