Norman Waddleton's public life fell into three discrete parts. Each differed markedly from the others but he gained a place of eminence in all.

The beginnings were not propitious. He was born in Darlington, Co Durham, in 1916 and, with a father who suffered from TB, his early years were difficult. He gained a place at Darlington Grammar School and from there won a scholarship to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to read natural sciences. In his second year he contracted TB and had to have a kidney removed, but the college arranged for him to spend six months at a nursing home on the eastern edge of the Lake District, and his gratitude for that gesture was to have repercussions some 50 years later.

Having a gift for languages, Waddleton left for Hamburg after graduating in 1937 and spent time mastering German (while billeted with a lawyer's family dedicated to the Nazi cause). He resolved to sign up immediately on his return to England, knowing that war was inevitable. In late 1938 he joined a telecommunications cartel run by Siemens and Halske. This introduced him to patent work, and a job with Polack, Mercer and Tench.

During this time he met and married his Dutch-born wife, Susan Jane, who was a dancer in the Sadler's Wells corps de ballet. Mixing with her Polish and Dutch friends he learnt Polish. He joined the Territorial Army and applied for a commission - when war was declared he moved as a commissioned officer to the Royal Corps of Signals.

He was to have a busy war as a telecommunications specialist first in France and then in the Western Desert and in the invasion of Italy. Sent to South Africa before the fall of Singapore, he volunteered his command of Polish and was reassigned to Montgomery's troops in North Africa. He worked with a Polish contingent which led, in 1944, to him winning the Krzyz Wale Cznych, the Cross of Valour, pinned on his chest by General Sikorski himself.

As in even the most active campaigns there are longueurs, so Waddleton found himself having to organise recreational activities. He engaged an Italian fencing master, discovering that his quick thinking and rapid reflex action suited the game. He was eventually to become secretary of the Amateur Fencing Association from 1957 until 1969 and an adviser in the selection of the British Olympic team.

Before being demobbed he had already put in a lot of preparation for his first professional exam as a patent agent (somewhat later to be dubbed “attorney” to bring the professional qualification into line with European and American nomenclature). He joined the firm of Marks and Clerk in 1948, already the most notable in Britain, and was soon promoted to managing partner, where he imaginatively and radically reshaped his firm, and then his profession, becoming, in 1980-81, president of the Council of the Institute of Patent Attorneys. This attests not only to his work on the awarding of patents, coining the term “intellectual property”, but also to an energetic involvement in the administration of the business and the establishment of studentships. Through Marks and Clerk he set up a company in Jersey, Computer Patent Annuities Limited, joined by agents worldwide, to pursue patent renewals, and he became a notable member of the European Patent Institute.

Waddleton's gifts as a linguist encouraged him to undertake a crash course in Russian in 1963 at the School of Slavonic Studies and this served in turn not only to involve him in East-West discussions on patent law but also to indulge his enthusiasm for art through a visit that was organised for his wife and himself to galleries in Moscow and Leningrad.

And it was that interest in art and in book illustration that gave rise to his third and most dramatic achievement. While visiting Toronto in the early 1970s Waddleton discovered that Ruari McLean's great collection of Victorian illustrated books had been sold to Massey College there, and he determined that a rival collection might be made with the expectation of its remaining in England. He did not see, however, why it should be confined to English books nor yet to 19th-century ones, and thus began the Waddleton Collection of Books with Colour Printed Illustrations or Decorations: 15th to 20th century. Once settled to his theme, like all great collectors with sufficient means, he pursued his quarry with zeal. To the delight of antiquarian booksellers everywhere he raided their shops, combed through their catalogues, let it be known to their community that he was in the market for colour printing, and before long his house in the Chilterns began to fill up with his acquisitions.

In 1979 he issued the first edition of The Waddleton Chronology, a hand list of the collection at that point, and this gradually expanded into a fifth edition of 656 pages, garnished with three indexes (the earliest specimen included was an Augsburg Sphaera Mundi with polychrome initials printed in 1488).

The chronology was eventually augmented by six supplements, which did not simply record works that he owned but added huge lists of those that he didn't, thus “magnanimously sharing with rivals his list of desiderata” as Bamber Gascoigne put it in a foreword to the third supplement. It was a mighty record - even if it was, early on, warily described by the Cambridge University librarian as making no claim “to be complete bibliographically or free from fault in presentation”.

True to his intention to make a collection that would be retained in Britain, Waddleton had hoped that his books might go to his old college, which had already made him an honorary Fellow for services to the patent profession. But the magnitude of his holdings, which ultimately numbered more than 27,000 volumes, would have been hard for Emmanuel, to administer and thus the Waddleton Collection was endowed to Emmanuel and through them to the university library.

The collection was garnered primarily to be of use to all who wished to investigate colour printing, and to that end he was eventually to design a website, bookartworld, that would more easily give international access to his holdings in the university library. At a grand ceremony in 2003, he was appointed Companion of the University's Guild of Benefactors by the Chancellor, the Duke of Edinburgh. He continued collecting until frailty brought him to a nursing home in the Chilterns.

His wife predeceased him. He is survived by two daughters and a son.

Norman Waddleton, patent attorney and collector of books and pictures, was born on May 2, 1916. He died on February 7, 2008, aged 91