Book Collecting

The hobby of seeking, acquiring, cataloging, displaying and preserving books that interest a given collector, rooted in bibliophilia, the love of books, whose practitioners are called bibliophiles; the value of a given book depends on its availability, condition and, for some copies, an author's signature. Book collecting traces back to the gathering of scrolls and papyri by ancient individuals and institutions, accelerated once Johannes Gutenberg's printing press made books more affordable and plentiful from the fifteenth century onward, and saw renewed enthusiasm for antiquarian volumes and manuscripts during the Romantic era of the eighteenth century, particularly after libraries were dispersed during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Prominent historical collectors include the British politician George John, second Earl Spencer, who amassed tens of thousands of volumes, and Sir Thomas Phillipps, described as the greatest collector of manuscript material the world has known, who assembled some 40,000 printed books and 60,000 manuscripts.