Bag collections

By popular request, here's a ranking of bag collectors worldwide, garnered from claims and bags listed on their websites. These are numbers of unique bags - it does not include duplicates.

Some of this information is hopelessly outdated, and baggists have been known to inflate their bag numbers in order to attract envy (or deflate their figures in order to lull competitors into a false sense of security).

There is no universally accepted way of counting unique bags. Some baggists collect anything that might conceivably contain human and even animal wastes (including sanitary bags and dogshit bags). I admit that I'm one of these.

Other baggists collect only logoed bags from airlines. They eschew plain white or generic bags, and won't even look at bags from buses, trains or boats.

Some bag taxonomists (the "splitters") spot minute differences between two apparently identical bags, while others (the "lumpers") are happy to accept two bags with radically different ink colours as the same.

This list does not include several major players in the baggame, including (in alphabetical order) Denir Lima de Camargo, Matthias Koch and Jaromir Kral. I eagerly await their figures.

The ranking is based on total figures of bags claimed by each collector. These numbers have not been verified by InterBag, the World Bagtrade Organization, the Royal Society for the Protection of Bags, or the International Federation of Organic Bagriculture Movements - or indeed, by anyone else. Please note that I accept absolutely no responsibility for any errors in this list. If you spot one, please let me know!

Data from email, website, other.

é ê è and show most recent movements in the ranking.

Grey shows baggists who have given up baggery - one hopes to go on to more sensible avocations.

gives the collector's eBay name.

Thanks to all who have helped compile this list. Updated 26 Sep 2008.

Collection bagometer