World's Largest Private Comics Collection (for now) - May 18

[Perry]

Sorry to hear it that. Bob. Try to think of the good times you shared, as much as you can.

[Webhead]

My condolences to you and for family for your loss Bob.

[BobBretall]

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts & prayers......

Today was my original date for the Guinness attempt, but that will now be 4 weeks from now on May 18th!!

I've been buying up cheap comics like mad so I can fill in the gap left by all the duplicates & "comics that are not comics (like OHOTMU & sketchbooks & pin-up issues, etc) Wow, I had a lot of these things accumulate over the years.

Guinness definition I'm working with:

This record is for the greatest number of different comic books in a private, personal collection.
This record is to be attempted by an individual.
This record is measured by the number of comic books in the collection that meet our criteria.

A comic book is a book / magazine made up of narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that
represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog.

[Perry]

Cool. By their definition you should be able to include Marvel Mags (Savage Sword, all the Curtis titles) too then, huh?

[BobBretall]

Cool. By their definition you should be able to include Marvel Mags (Savage Sword, all the Curtis titles) too then, huh?

Absolutely! I have a pile of them. All (or almost all) of the Marvel ones were bought off the rack. I have a decent selection of the Warren ones too.

[ctowner1]

Bob, so any idea on how many comics are in the SECOND biggest collection behind yours? Is it a close race??

e
L nny

[BobBretall]

Bob, so any idea on how many comics are in the SECOND biggest collection behind yours? Is it a close race??

e
L nny

From the 2nd paragraph of the 1st post in this thread:

A guy from Australia with a 68,000 comic book collection, called the "World's Largest" by the Australian "World Record Academy".

That's the only other one on record.

Lots of collections out there that are not vetted that can be bigger than mine, near mine, or smaller.

One thing I learned is that filtering out doubles & "non-comics" had me take a hit of several thousand, so you can't just do a simple numeric count from the database.

[ctowner1]

Bob, so any idea on how many comics are in the SECOND biggest collection behind yours? Is it a close race??

e
L nny

From the 2nd paragraph of the 1st post in this thread:

A guy from Australia with a 68,000 comic book collection, called the "World's Largest" by the Australian "World Record Academy".

oops!

That's the only other one on record.

Lots of collections out there that are not vetted that can be bigger than mine, near mine, or smaller.

One thing I learned is that filtering out doubles & "non-comics" had me take a hit of several thousand, so you can't just do a simple numeric count from the database.

so you're pretty far a head of that guy - doesn't seem like you need to be beefing up much?

e
L nny

[BobBretall]

so you're pretty far a head of that guy - doesn't seem like you need to be beefing up much?

e
L nny

More perceptual.....I want to get back as close as I can to where I thought I was before I had to take a lot of stuff out of my count....

[comicm]

So sorry for your loss Bob.

[ctowner1]

so you're pretty far a head of that guy - doesn't seem like you need to be beefing up much?

e
L nny

More perceptual.....I want to get back as close as I can to where I thought I was before I had to take a lot of stuff out of my count....

I dunno...it sort seems a bit like cheating! You're not adding to your collection in the "natural" way that you've done the past 40+ years. You've always bought/acquired comics based on your love of the medium, not to make your collection bigger! [WebWiz15]

e
L nny

[comicsjayne]

Good luck this weekend. Can't wait to see the pictures/video. Just heard you are leaving the podcast. Best of luck. Hope you still have "guest appearances" left in you.

[drew]

good luck tommorrow Bob

[BobBretall]

Whew!!!

It's over now...... Now it's a matter of gathering up the evidence, witness statements, and pulling together the film/photographic evidence and sending it off to Guinness. The total # of comics was: 89,613





I had over 40 people show up throughout the day and a LOT of people stayed for several hours to chat about comics, eat pizza, and browse through the collection.





I gave tours to lots of folks, performed the "trick" (quite a number of times) of finding any named comic by looking it up in the database & then going to pull the appropriate box out of the 320+ and produce the named comic within a matter of minutes.



One of my expert witnesses (Michael Hamersky, who runs a comics sales/marketing web-site) used to be an accountant & auditor and he did a really thorough job of ensuring I had all the boxes claimed on my inventory and also doing a number of spot checks including doing full manual counts of several random long boxes pulled from the collection to ensure the counts matched what I had in my database.



In the end I gave away 5 1/2 long boxes of "extra" comics, an estimated 1400 comics!!!!! An average of ~33 comics per person.





I only got about 2 1/2 hours of sleep last night, I was up until 4:30am getting the final data scrub completed on my database & getting my pivot-table (presenting the data in an easy-to- use format) to work on the data export that I had in Excel 2010.

It will likely be several months before I get any definite decision from Guinness, but I'm well on my way!

[comicsjayne]

Congrats Bob. Sounded like it was a great but exhausting time.