Are souvenir ink stamps at tourist attractions popular in the USA?
During my holidays with my parents (as a child), especially in Polish/Czech/Slovak mountains, we were collecting ink stamps from tourist attractions, mountain shelters, national park entrances. These stamps work as a souvenir or as a confirmation that you have visited that location. They seem to be pretty popular in Poland even nowadays, as every museum, gallery, tourist office has at least one. Therefore, me and my wife started collecting ink stamps from locations visited during holidays in a special notebook. We have managed to collect some in Slovakia, Czechia, Ukraine, Italy, or even in San Marino.
Either by not knowing the exact English name, or because of lack of such ink stamps, I cannot find any information whether these exist in the USA. After the COVID pandemic we plan to visit the USA (either the South West or the East Coast - yes, a Fallout 3/NV fan indeed).
Do such souvenir ink stamps exist in the USA, in what kind of locations are they available (national parks, shelters, museum, tourist offices, post offices?), and how are they called exactly?
As I need to be precise, I limit the question to the USA, but if you have such a knowledge about any other, especially non-European country, do not hesitate to answer in a comment :)
I attach one of pages from our notebook below.
Best Answer
In US you can get National Park stamps as shown by Wikipedia
National Park Passport Stamps
At nearly all of the 421 American National Park units of the United States (and many of the National Park Service's affiliated areas), one or more National Park Passport Stamps (cancellation stamps) can be acquired at no cost at park visitor centers and ranger stations. The stamps are similar in nature to passport stamps stamped in a traveler's national passport. The stamps serve as a record of each park visit.
Here is one example program:
Get Your National Park Passport Stamped at Minuteman Missile
The Passport program was started by Eastern National Parks Association in 1986 and was established to help visitors discover the beauty and history found in America’s national parks. Cancellation stamps can be found at national parks and monuments. These rubber-stamp ink markings record the name of the park and the date of your visit.
There are "passport books" available to collect the stamps in, and here is an example stamp:
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Are souvenir passport stamps legal?
Souvenir Stamps from Tourist Attractions This type of passport stamp is not legal under State Department regulations. Although it's unusual for travelers to run into trouble because of these unauthorized stamps, it does happen on occasion.Can you stamp your own passport?
Officially, you are probably not supposed to stamp anything in your passport yourself. However, in Berlin for example, you can get souvenir stamp from the former different occupation zones of Berlin. They stamp these in dozens of passports daily.Travel Editors Share Their Favorite Souvenirs | SmarterTravel
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Images: Maxim Titov, Ketut Subiyanto, Ketut Subiyanto, Gintarė Kairaitytė