Review of the International Autograph Society meeting 2010

International Autograph Society/Ada meeting 2010 in Kesswil, Switzerland.

By Tove Myhr and Rune Moe.

The annual meeting of the International Autograph Society/Ada took place on 12th June 2010 in the beautiful small village Kesswil on the banks of Lake Constance in Switzerland.

The event started on Friday night, June 11 with a barbecue party in the garden of the "House of handwritten history". Markus Brandes and Melanie hosted a great party which we all enjoyed very much.

There were collectors from the USA, Germany, Hungary, and Norway attending both the barbecue and Saturday’s meeting. It was very nice to meet “old” friends and some new friends as well. The food was a very well tasting barbecued sucking pig!

For the meeting Markus Brandes Autographs had published a 260 pages hardcover book: "The magic of handwriting II", containing color images of hundreds of autographs from their inventory. An impressive and important book for autograph collectors.

Saturday morning we met at a club house in Kesswil for the annual meeting.
During the general meeting, Ralf Hahn was elected as new President of AdA and Ingo Fleisch became treasurer.

Alexander Mehl had provided an exhibition of Beatles forgeries.

Such forgery examples are a good way to teach us collectors about the different types of forgeries.

During the meeting there was a lecture by Dr. Richard Kim, USA, about Electronic Signature Authentication and Memorabilia Registry and a second lecture by Marita Kuhn from the Atelier für Papierrestaurierung about conservation an restoration of old documents and autographs. Both lectures were partly translated by Dr. Kammeier, the first one into German and the second one into English. Thanks a lot for that service!

Rolf Ramseier showed an exhibition of his collection of autographs related to Switzerland and there were also other collectors who put their collections on display during the meeting.

We also visited the birthhouse of C.G. Jung in Kesswil. Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and founder of analytical psychology.

For English speaking collectors it is difficult to understand German language, and therefore we are very pleased that there was translation from German to English both at the meeting, during the lectures and
also during the visit to the C.G. Jung house.

In the afternoon the event opened to the public, and it was nice to see that a lot of local people wanted to see the collections on display.

Later in the afternoon we all went to Markus Brandes “House of handwritten history. Markus showed us his autograph gallery with many very important and impressive autographs. To see other collections and
galleries of autographs is awesome, and Markus’’ gallery made no exception!

We concluded the event with a nice dinner saturday evening in a old restaurant in Kesswil.

This meeting of The International Autograph Society/AdA was very nice as it was very special. It was a like a big family meeting and very different from other international autograph meetings.

A true Autograph Community in Unity!


All collectors we spoke to liked the AdA meeting very much. We also think that the meeting was perhaps one of the "cleanest" shows worldwide with no questionable autographs but highly educational topics.

For us two collectors from Norway it was pleasant to come to Switzerland and enjoy + 30C and sun. When Tove left her home is was only + 6C, so the difference was huge.

We wish to thank AdA and Markus Brandes for making a great meeting 2010, and we already look forward to June 2011 and the AdA meeting in Münster!

Picture Gallery from the meeting

TV Report on BLICK.ch