What's the lure of autographed magazine covers?

A collector from Appleton, Wisconsin sent copies of Time magazine covers for a decade in the '60s and early '70s to the people featured in them and asked for them to be autographed. According to an AP story, more than 250 people responded to Jerry Gottleib's request and his family have shared them with the Trout Museum of Art in Appleton for an exhibit called "Moments in TIME", which will be on display until June 29. 

According to the museum, Gottleib’s greatest challenges were securing signatures for covers featuring more than one person. Some of his successes included all four of the Beatles as well as the Apollo 11 astronauts. 

The exhibit also features the Robert Kennedy cover designed by Roy Lichtenstein and dated two weeks before Kennedy’s assassination.

Gottleib was not the only person who had this peculiar hobby. A man called Roger Brink from El Dorado Hills, California , collected covers for some 39 years -- 2,000 or them in five huge binders.

He has received signatures from the likes of Henry Kissinger and Jay Leno. The holdouts? The Vatican and the British royal family. Brink hopes that Will and Kate, the modern royals that they are, will break that tradition. After all, Ronald Reagan signed covers five times. He once got Katharine Hepburn on the phone while trying to get her signature. Muammar Gaddafi signed a cover for him, though not in English.

 A man from New Jersey, Scott Smith, decided to make it his quest to get every Sports Illustrated cover autographed. He told the LA Times that he had multiple autographs from much-covered subjects such as Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali and Mickey Mantle. There are 4,413 sports stars on 2,913 covers of SI, but an unnamed woman on the cover of the October 17, 1960 issue, holding a kite, eluded him. She died at the age of 81 on the same day as he talked to the LA Times. A cosmic joke.