📚 Book Collecting

Editions, bindings, condition: the quiet sport of building a shelf, and the catalogs it built back.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject book collecting in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Books and bookmen	Andrew Lang	1886	85
	Literary taste	Arnold Bennett	1900	74
	The Library	Andrew Lang	1881	64
	Bookman's Price Index	Daniel F. McGrath	1964	47
	Philobiblon	Richard de Bury	1599	38
	Bookman's Price Index	Anne F. McGrath	1993	35
	The amenities of book-collecting and kindred affections	A. Edward Newton	1918	24
	The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac	Eugene Field	1896	20
	The book-hunter, etc	John Hill Burton	1862	17
	The book-hunter	John Hill Burton	1863	17
	False delicacy	Hugh Kelly	1768	15
	The anatomy of bibliomania	Holbrook Jackson	1930	15
	Bibliomania	Thomas Frognall Dibdin	1809	14
	The book-hunter in Paris	Octave Uzanne	1893	13
	The great book-collectors	Charles Isaac Elton	1893	12
	Taste & technique in book-collecting	John Carter	1948	11
	The man who loved books too much	Allison Hoover Bartlett	2009	11
	This book-collecting game	A. Edward Newton	1928	10
	Philobiblon	Richard de Bury	1832	9
	Die grossen bibliophilen	G. A. E. Bogeng	1922	9
	Books about books	Swann Galleries	1982	9
	Chats in the book-room	Horace N. Pym	1896	8
	The book-collector	William Carew Hazlitt	1904	8
	The book-hunter at home	P. B. M. Allan	1920	8
	The elements of book-collecting	Iolo Aneurin Williams	1927	8
	Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions	Bill McBride	1980	8
	The library companion	Thomas Frognall Dibdin	1824	7
	A primer of book collecting	John Tracy Winterich	1927	7
	Is my old book valuable?	Edward L. Sterne	1958	7
	Le livre	Octave Uzanne	1882	6

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.