Autograph club

Autograph collecting may have started in the 16th century when Germans kept albums of correspondence when they traveled. By the late 18th century in Europe it was popular to collect letters of famous people. Until the 20th century, literary, political, and religious autographs were collected. With the creation of the cinema, radio, and television autographs from popular culture figures were sought. Since the mid-1970s hobby shops began appearing in the United States. The hobby of collecting autographs took off in the 1980s. By the 1990s the industry skyrocketed. According to Brookes Barnes, the autograph market is worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Handwritten letters are most sought after and are valued at three to five times the value of typed letters. A handwritten letter from Beethoven fetched $50,000 and a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis fetched $10,500. In the early years sports signatures were particularly sought after reaching high prices. The death of any celebrity resulted in a rise in prices of autograph memorabilia. This made autographs of all types worth collecting. According to an article in the New York Times by Diane Sierpina, there are 1 million autographed document collectors nationwide and there are 5 million autographs collectors in the United States alone. According to Sports Collector Digest, the sports autograph market is worth $500 million. This number is in sports autographs alone; add celebrity, political, and other categories of autographs, and the number might reach the billions.

In the late 1990s according to the FBI, 70% of autograph memorabilia on the market was bogus. Due to the large amount of counterfeit autograph memorabilia, autograph clubs were developed to give potential purchasers the confidence to buy. It is a fact that a piece of autograph memorabilia is sold every 15 seconds on eBay or other Internet sites. The Autograph Club was first seen in the 1940s, with the hobby growing different clubs began emerging onto the scene. As the autograph clubs advanced, they began developing many new strategies to help the collector. Historically, clubs occurred in many different countries. Once people started buying, selling, and trading, there was need for people with a common interest to be able to associate with one another despite having no ties other than a common hobby. Autograph clubs were created for interest and enjoyment, along with financial rewards. Involvement in autograph clubs can lead to building advanced skills, knowledge, and experience. Education is the aim of most autograph clubs.

In 2013 the World Leaders Autograph Society was created and founded in Krakow by four participants from Poland, Norway and Slovakia. WLAS is an independent and nonprofit community of people from all over the world who share the common hobby - collecting of autographs of world leaders. This closed community has 34 members from 16 countries - Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, the Philippines, the USA, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates.

• Collecting Autographs and Manuscripts by Charles Hamilton, Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1961
• The Complete Book of Autograph Collecting by George Sullivan, 1971
• Collecting Autographs by Herman M. Darvick, Julian Messner/Simon & Schuster, 1981
• American Autographs by Charles Hamilton, 2 vols., Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1983