On page 114 of Guinness World Records 2008, the claim is made that the largest collection of books autographed by their authors owned by anyone (I assume they mean in a private collection, not a library collection or a book dealer’s stock) is 722. I have good reasons to think this number is absurdly low. Can anyone here point me to some source (a website or a person or an association or whatever) concerned with large private collections of autographed books? Or does anyone know someone who has much more autographed books than that? Before I write the Guinness people to dispute this record, I’d like to have some idea how far off this number is. I’ve tried Googling on “autographed books” or “signed books” and found nothing except links to book dealers who sell autographed books.
I have one question, before you get started - I think it would be informative to know, does Guiness insist that the autographs be collected personally by the person making the collection? i.e. are they all what I’d call ‘first person’ autographs, or is it a collection of books that had, at some point been autographed, many for completely different people than the person holding the collection. ISTR that some autograph hounds view anything other than the ‘first person’ autograph - made expressly for the person holding the collection - to be cheats.
If Guiness holds to that definition, 722 seems a quite reasonable number for the largest collection.
The Guinness book doesn’t say. I don’t think it matters. I know of someone who has collected three times that many autographed books by himself. It hasn’t been that hard for this person to get that many of his books autographed by the authors, so I would suspect that other people who’ve been more single-minded about it could collect more. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for an answer to my question. Does anyone know of any website or person or association who might know more about this? Does anyone know of anyone who’s collected more autographed books than this?