Customer Reviews

Autograph Collector Celebrity Autograph Authentication Guide: Authentic Examples of Over 1,000 Celebrity Autographs

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The first thing you'll notice about this book, the minute you open it up to page 1, are the ads. That's right, this book has *advertisements* in it. But not just a few ads, 25 FULL PAGES OF ADVERTISEMENTS! The ads clutter up the front and back of the book, which makes it a pain to quickly locate the index at the back of the book (placed right before all the ads). What good is an index if it itself requires a little bit of searching to find?!? The ads are mostly for companies selling autographed photos. A list of these companies should have been put at the back of the book (before the index) for those who are interested. Putting full-page and half-page ads is ridiculous. Because of all the ads, I feel that this book should be free, or at least cost less than half of what it currently sells for.

Now that let me get to the REAL content of the book - the autograph examples. The book lists many, many stars, including a few I was surprised to see (Melanie Chartoff and Ray Parker Jr., for example), but there are also many that are missing which should have been in there (Samantha Mathis and Hayley Mills, for example). Granted, I know that it is virtually impossible to list every celebrity that ever existed, but they could have made the autograph examples a little smaller and fit more people in there. In fact, there are some pages where there is only one or two examples on the entire page. Heck, come to think of it, the text in the introductory lessons to authenticating autographs is way too large. It should have been shrunken down to standard size, so that more autograph examples could be placed in the book. Also, it would have been a great idea to put, at least, two examples of each star's autograph in the book, just to account for variations in the way a person signs (no person signs his/her name exactly the same way every time).

All griping aside, this is actually a great book and I *am* glad that I bought it. The ads are a pain to deal with (I'm tempted to rip them out, but I don't want to ruin the book), but I guess nothing in life is perfect. At least now you have a little more information about this book than I did when I purchased it.

A great book full of tons of examples of signatures. I have used this book to go through my entire collection to check the authenticity. I wouldn't want to be without it. A BIG hit!

I was very disappointed that some big Hollywood stars were not in the book (including some that were easy to come by), and yet so many stars that I've never even heard of were filling so many pages. I've been a serious Hollywood autograph collector and enthusiast for over 20 years and was upset to see some of the bigger stars not included. Some big and popular stars missing were Dustin Hoffman, Orson Welles, Cyd Charisse, Christopher Reeve, and Gloria Swanson. And who in the world is Kelly Reno? Sherilyn Wolter? Jackee Harry??

A waste of my money.

I am not a big fan of this book. If you subscribe to "The Autograph Collector" magazine, you would know that 80% of the magazine is advertisements, and you would think spending [money] on a book you wouldn't have 25 pages of ads. Also, many of the signatures in this book do not match signatures I have received in person. In stead of the ad's they should have used that extra 25 pages to list more examples of stars signatures, or at least list more people. I would suggest that they make the signatures themselves smaller, as many people are copying the signatures out of the book onto index cards and photos, and selling the forgeries on ebay. All together, I would suggest you buy a different book; this one is not even worth what you would pay for it used.