To Have And To Hold: An Intimate History Of Collectors And Collecting - Hardcover

Blom, Philipp

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713994762 ISBN 13: 9780713994766

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2002

Synopsis

Collecting is one of the most common pastimes, and can often become a passion bordering on the obsessive. Our familiarity with the pursuit, however, obscures the questions at its heart: why do people amass things that have no use? What drives them to spend time and money getting hold of a single stamp, an unusual beermat, or a rare doll, only to put it in a folder or on a shelf? Why do we feel the need to possess these items, and why is it not enough to know that they exist in a museum, or somewhere else? In this book, Philip Blom delves into the history of the collecting passion and explores it through a series of interlinked portraits, stories and discoveries, each characteristic of a period. What emerges is the story of a human quest more intimately linked with our primal needs than many would have thought possible. Investigating the history of collecting from the Renaissance to our day, Blom shows a multiplicity of worlds: the scientific cabinets of the 15th century and an Italian scholar employed as dragon slayer; the "Ark" of the Tradescants and a friend's betrayal; Emperor Rudolf II's Prague collection as "practised alchemy"; the macabre art of Dr. Frederik Ruysch, first among embalmers; and the over-flowing menagerie of Sir Hans Sloane's curiosities, later to become the foundation of the British Museum. He also discusses the strange fate of Angelo Soliman, a black man at the Habsburg court who was stuffed and exhibited with wild animals; explores the rise of scientific collecting and classification, and parallel to it, the explosion of collecting as the private passion of hundreds of thousands; and introduces Robert Opie, whose collection of half a million items of household packaging now fills his home in London and two overflowing warehouses in Gloucestershire besides. Out of this glittering diversity of material Blom distils the themes underlying this seemingly elusive pursuit; conquest and possession, and the awareness of our own mortality. The instinct to collect, he says, is rooted in our very being: "Saving the world, or a world, preserving history or genius, saintliness or innocence, touching something beyond our random existence is a labour of love, a constant ritual, one face of the desire to be authentic, to be human".

About this title

About the Author:

Philipp Blom has written two novels and is a widely published journalist. He has worked as an historian and a book editor.

From Publishers Weekly:

The mania of collecting, a pastime usually reserved for the most wealthy of individuals, has a long history, says German-born journalist Blom. For many collectors, "money is no object, and objects are everything." Blom begins his formal, idiosyncratic chronicle in the 16th century, when the Renaissance-fueled explosion of scientific inquiry led to a boom in what the Dutch referred to as cabinets of curiosities. Typically stocked with small antiques and remains of strange animals and men (fake and real), they were popular among the rich and bourgeois across Europe through the next few centuries. Blom follows the tradition into the dark castles of crazed aristocrats and obsessed collectors (such as the 18th-century German doctor who had a collection of skulls taken from the local gallows and asylum) who thought to compile small, neurotically labeled and catalogued worlds, which countered the chaotic one outside their walls. Although Blom's book sticks mainly to highbrow collecting-e.g., old master drawings, snuffboxes, architectural models, human skulls, books-and does not come to any conclusions on what drives people to collect, it is an admirable attempt to chart the history of an obsession. 53 b&w illus. and photos.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0713994762
• ISBN 13: 9780713994766
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288