📚 Collectors & Collecting

The urge and its literature: why people gather, catalogue, and bequeath — and what collections do to history.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject collectors and 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
	Stamp Catalogue	Stanley Gibbons	1980	50
	Little Dorrit	Charles Dickens	1857	28
	MILLER'S COLLECTABLES PRICE GUIDE	Madeleine Marsh	1997	27
	Text book 3e & Romeo and Juliet	William Shakespeare	1901	25
	Antiques & Collectibles Price Guide 1996	Kyle Husfloen	1989	22
	The gun collector's handbook of values	Charles Edward Chapel	1940	16
	Miller's Understanding Antiques	Judith Miller	1987	15
	Elegant glassware of the Depression era	Gene Florence	1983	14
	The Collector's Encyclopedia of Depression Glass	Gene Florence	1974	13
	An encyclopedia of antiques	Harold Lewis Bond	1937	10
	Guide to antique American firearms and their values	Norm Flayderman	1977	10
	Standard encyclopedia of carnival glass	Edwards, Bill.	1982	10
	Bottles	Michael Polak	1994	10
	Let's go rock collecting	Roma Gans	1984	9
	The collector's encyclopedia of buttons	Sally C. Luscomb	1967	8
	Foreign devils on the Silk Road	Peter Hopkirk	1980	8
	Costume Jewelry	Nancy Schiffer	1988	7
	Miller's Antiques & Collectables	Judith Miller	1994	7
	Depression Glass	Doris Yeske	1997	7
	Coin collecting for dummies	Neil S. Berman	2008	7
	The gun digest book of modern gun values	Dan Shideler	2006	6
	Majolica pottery	Mariann Katz-Marks	1983	5
	Fountain Pens	Jonathan Steinberg	1994	5
	Miller's Pottery Antiques Checklist	Gordon Lang	1995	5
	Goldmine Record Album Price Guide	Tim Neely	1999	5
	The collector's encyclopedia of dolls	Dorothy S. Coleman	1968	4
	The illustrated guide to collecting bottles	Cecil Munsey	1970	4
	Buttons	Victor Houart	1977	4
	Discovering old buttons	Primrose Peacock	1978	4
	The collector's encyclopedia of Limoges porcelain	Mary Frank Gaston	1980	4

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.