he Anatomy of Obsession
By Ed Maggs
Maggs' inventory on Abebooks

Courtesy of Rarebookreview - the magazine to open up the world of rare books.

At my son's christening, the rather austere Presbyterian minister warned us on Ben's behalf of the dangers of the material world. To me, and most of the booksellers in the congregation, this came close to heresy, and I would rather he had made a distinction between consuming, which is the process of desiring and owning things without caring what they mean, and collecting, which is really part of an attempt to study and understand the world.

An important part of the collecting instinct is the belief in the possibility of the 'perfect' object, where the thing becomes almost transubstantive. We search so hard and if necessary pay so much for these representations of perfection – the Willesden-built Mercedes (ask me), the Vincent Black Shadow, the Pogliaghi track bike, the Cobden-Sanderson heart-shaped jewel box, or the set of the Arab Bulletin. It applies to performance as well: David Gower driving his first ball in test cricket through the covers for four, or Jacqueline du Pr é rehearsing the Elgar cello concerto in a Malvern church hall. Although these experiences leave little behind, they do offer the possibility of escape into a temporary small heaven. Indeed, all these cultural exercises promise us an ecstasy once offered by religion: our Quad valve amplifiers, our John Piper watercolours or Sam Snead niblicks are the modern household shrines. We may respect or revere them, or take them for granted: the choice is the important thing. Some obsessive needs are better left unfilled: having read Elizabeth David on the subject I once became obsessed with the cassoulet. I read extensively on the subject, and organised an excursion to the number one cassoulet restaurant, in Castelnaudary. Months of anticipation and planning for . . . well, in fact, actually, a bean stew.

A rather more well-anchored take on dream objects was given by an archeological metallurgist in a radio piece about famous swords and their role in Arthurian legend. His thesis was that these legendary weapons were actually qualitatively better: they were stronger and sharper, but due to accidents of manufacture – maybe there had been a bit more arsenic in the ore, or maybe a slightly different heat in the forge. Because the science was experimental, and the makers didn’t understand why they were better, they weren’t replicable, and so possession of one of these swords became a very important thing indeed, and they, like the Complutensian Polyglot Bible on vellum, were attributed supernatural qualities.

The mention of blades brings us necessarily to Japan, a particularly obsessive nation. They are keen on the notion of a man’s soul being invested in his work, which is often an important part of the obsession-worthy object. Any country that can find meaning in a cup of tea, or which holds that it takes four years of study to learn how to cook rice, is primed to take its artists and craftsmen seriously, which they do remarkably in their culture of the ‘living national treasure’. It’s to do with the ‘nobility of labour’, I suppose, but it’s also related to an anthropomorphist approach to inanimate objects. The preacher in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (or at least the film version) won’t accept that his old car is beyond repair, because it is a ‘Good Car’: a wobbly Shoji Hamada bowl is a ‘Good Pot’, because of the sincerity of the maker. There are watchmakers in Switzerland, living in remote valleys, who only complete one watch every two years. Buy one of these and you buy a work of the soul as much as a work of the hand. In Japan, where obsessive behaviour is much more socially acceptable than over here, intense collectors are known, quite respectfully, as ‘maniacs’, and their pursuit not only of masterpieces, but also of minutiae, is well thought of. If you can see heaven in a grain of sand, then why not see it in a Doves Press Bible on vellum, the original Chess pressing of Billy Barrix’s ‘Cool Off Baby’, a bottle of Roman é e Conti, or a pair of 1870s New Hampshire Levi’s jeans? If Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane means something to you, why should not his advertisements for Findus fish fingers?

There’s an escapist component to obsession, of course, and that is the idea of the material object as a bulwark against the horrors of the world. It offers the promise of access to a prelapsarian innocence: a lack of ambiguity. You might think this is a typically masculine thing, a flight from the quicksands of emotion to the certainty of history, but my favourite expression of it comes from two female characters. In Helen Waddell’s Peter Abelard, in a medieval atmosphere heavy with death and sex, a manuscript offers Godric and Heloise ‘a quick escape from personal relations into the clear dry air’ of paleography.

And don’t worry, I still love cassoulet: the fault was all mine.