Autographen#
Autographs (original manuscripts) have been collected since the beginning of the 16th century. The first public auction of such manuscripts in the German language was organised in Vienna in 1838 by the bookseller F. Graeffer. Most libraries and archives today own autograph collections; leading collections are those of the Austrian National Library with its 274,783 autographs and approximately 35,000 pages of photocopies in the archives of music manuscripts of the Music Collection (dedicated to A. van Hoboken) and the Vienna Stadtbibliothek (city library) with approximately 220,000 autographs and modern manuscripts, as well as 16,000 musicians' manuscripts.