Book collecting is the collecting of books, including seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever books are of interest to a given collector. The love of books is bibliophilia, and someone who loves to read, admire, and collect books is called a bibliophile.
Bibliophilia or bibliophilism is the love of books, and a bibliophile or bookworm is an individual who loves and frequently reads books, though bookworm is sometimes used pejoratively.
Harry Elkins Widener was an American businessman and bibliophile, and a member of the Widener family. His mother built Harvard University's Widener Memorial Library in his memory, after his death on the foundering of the RMS Titanic.
Rudolph Ruzicka was a Czech-born American wood engraver, etcher, illustrator, typeface designer, and book designer. Ruzicka designed typefaces and wood engraving illustrations for Daniel Berkeley Updike's Merrymount Press, and was a designer for, and consultant to, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company for fifty years. He designed a number of seals and medals, including the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and the Dartmouth Medal of the American Library Association.
Frederick Baldwin Adams Jr. was an American bibliophile and the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City from 1948–1969.
Walter Montgomery Jackson (1863–1923) was the founder of encyclopedia publisher Grolier, Inc., and he was the partner of Horace Everett Hooper in publishing the 10th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica and in developing its 11th edition. He split with Hooper in 1908-1909 in a nasty legal fight after failing to wrest control of the Britannica from Hooper,
Edwin Davis French (1851–1906) was a bookplate engraver, who produced at least 330 engravings beginning in 1893.
Helmut Nathan Friedlaender was an American lawyer and financial adviser who collected rare books.
The Caxton Club is a private social club and bibliophilic society founded in Chicago in 1895 to promote the book arts and the history of the book. To further its goals, the club holds monthly dinner meetings and luncheons, sponsors bibliophile events and exhibitions, and publishes books, exhibition catalogs, and a monthly journal, The Caxtonian. The Caxton Club is a member club of the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies.
The Hroswitha Club was a membership-based club of women bibliophiles and collectors based in New York City, active from 1944 to 1999.
Sarah Gildersleeve Fife was a prominent force among women bibliophiles in the first half of the 20th century and a leader in gardening and horticulture, advocating the use of plantings around army bases and military hospitals.
Robert H. Taylor was a bibliophile who was president of the Grolier Club, the Keats-Shelley Association of America and the Bibliographical Society of America. He donated his collection of 7,000 books, manuscripts and drawings to Princeton University in 1971. He had graduated from Princeton in 1930.
John Tracy Winterich (1891–1970) was born in Middletown, CT on May 25, 1891. He grew up in Providence, RI and graduated from Brown University in 1912. He was Managing Editor of Stars & Stripes, a prolific contributor of articles to many journals and a prominent American bibliophile in the first half of the twentieth century. He was best known as a contributing editor of the Saturday Review, a position he had held since 1946, after a brief stint as managing editor. While working for Saturday Review he was the original author of "The Criminal Record", a weekly column in which crime and detective fiction was reviewed by Winterich under his pseudonym "Sergeant Cuff", taken from the detective in Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone.
G. Thomas Tanselle is an American textual critic, bibliographer, and book collector, especially known for his work on Herman Melville. He was Vice-President, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, 1978-2006.
The Book Club of Detroit, is a private club and society of bibliophiles in downtown Detroit, Michigan. Founded in 1957, The Book Club of Detroit, is a club for book collectors.
The Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies (FABS) is an association of American book clubs whose members seek interaction with book collectors across the country and around the world. At The Rowfant Club's 100th anniversary celebration in 1992, local members and their guests from book clubs in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco discovered common interests of bibliophilic book clubs. The new association's first meeting was November 5, 1993, in New York, at The Grolier Club. In 1994, the group drew up articles of association outlining their goals to promote and develop common interests of the member societies.
As of 2018, several firms in the United States rank among the world's biggest publishers of books in terms of revenue: Cengage Learning, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill Education, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, and Wiley.
