Brian Burke scoured yard sales, tag sales and antiques shops around the globe. For 30 years, he built his collection of handshake memorabilia -- like the Roman Empire itself -- piece by piece.

As a result, he owns thousands of objects of both value and kitsch, including 3,000 postcards alone. There are coins, busts, banners, even a gravestone, all depicting a handshake. It all overtook a classroom (he retired last spring after 39 years as a Latin and English teacher at Germantown Academy) and a former Jenkintown condo he called "Handshake House." It's a moniker that's followed him, he says, to the Fairmount-section apartment he moved into this summer.

Philadelphia is a perfect repository, Burke says. At the very least, the world's only known handshake historian says the city can lay serious claim to having reinvented the handshake. In his aspirations for brotherhood among all, William Penn shook everyone's hands.

"The Quaker democratic ethic in Philadelphia took the European habit of pledging faith (with a handshake) and planted it in the fertile soil of a democracy," he says. "Since this pledge of faith could grow more meaningfully in democratic Philadelphia than in aristocratic Europe, Philadelphia, more than aristocratic Virginia or theocratic Boston, may be said to have given the handshake a new birth."

The 60-year-old Burke's interest began in 1974 while he was looking for images for a Latin course. He purchased a 49 B.C. Roman coin from a Walnut Street dealer. Now in a safety deposit box, it features goddess of fertility Pietas on one side and clasped hands on the reverse. A year later, to help with a theme-based English course on friendship, he bought a circa-1900 glass paperweight that encloses clasped hands with the word "friendship."

Whether his students were reading Homer, Virgil or Hemingway, the handshake always had a foothold in Burke's classes. He says he could occupy students for months in a Virgil course, "just with passages that end in a hand clasp." In English, he'd cover Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, which contains a handshake every eight pages for 800-some pages. "I've just been observant to that sort of thing," Burke says.

As for the fascination, he says the handshake represents a pledge of good faith, a personal allegiance; similar to other abstract concepts like love and faith, the handshake is a difficult topic "to get a hold on."

The handshake, Burke says, "is an acquired skill, and does not represent how good and sincere we are but how well we have been trained to represent ourselves as good and sincere."

Needless to say, he's cultivated his own handshake over the years. He also admits he's overly self-conscious about it: "I hold mine a little longer than most," Burke says, adding that although he's never timed it, he figures his grasp lasts three seconds. Still, he advises the shake shouldn't be so long that it makes the other person uncomfortable.

Burke's so preoccupied with the handshake that he recently declined membership in a city church when he was disappointed by the minister's "fishy" handshake.

He's no fan of the bone-crushing handshake (aka the power shake) or those who don't make eye contact while shaking. He dismisses as "too cute" the up-and-down "pump-handle" shake like the one exchanged by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Top Hat, a 1930s dance musical he's studied.

As an academic, Burke, who grew up in Overbrook before landing at Episcopal Academy, then Harvard, Michigan and Bryn Mawr to earn his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D., respectively, all in classics and Latin, says it'd be easy for the book he's preparing on the topic to be scholarly and boring. Instead, he'll focus on the sociological aspect of the handshake.

He'd like to finish writing in the next two years, while also slowly sending his expansive collection to auction, thus, er, washing his hands of it. "Every class has a beginning and an end," he says. He contends the book "must do a duty" to his collection. Thus far, a presidential motif has guided his research.

Of note, in 1906 or 1907, Theodore Roosevelt set a still-standing single-day presidential record of approximately 8,000 handshakes at a New Year's reception. "It was an athletic undertaking," Burke says. George Washington, on the other hand, was never fond of shaking: "Washington was such an aristocrat that pressing flesh was hardly his thing."

However, it's Abraham Lincoln he loves as much as the handshake itself. The 16th president is fodder for Chapter 1. Burke reveals that the day Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, his hand was so sore from shaking hands the day before, he almost couldn't sign the landmark document.

As for George W. Bush, Burke says the president "could fit" into the book, but he's "not classical yet." "Most presidents have a handshake personality, but I haven't read anything about Bush's," he says.

In the meantime, Burke will be working to get his hands around it.