To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting

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From amassing sacred relics to collecting celebrity memorabilia, the impulse to hoard has gripped humankind throughout the centuries. But what is it that drives people to possess objects that have no conceivable use? To Have and To Hold is a captivating tour of collectors and their treasures from medieval times to the present, from a cabinet containing unicorn horns and a Tsar's collection of teeth to the macabre art of embalmer Dr. Frederick Ruysch, the fabled castle of William Randolph Hearst, and the truly ...
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To Have and To Hold

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Overview

From amassing sacred relics to collecting celebrity memorabilia, the impulse to hoard has gripped humankind throughout the centuries. But what is it that drives people to possess objects that have no conceivable use? To Have and To Hold is a captivating tour of collectors and their treasures from medieval times to the present, from a cabinet containing unicorn horns and a Tsar's collection of teeth to the macabre art of embalmer Dr. Frederick Ruysch, the fabled castle of William Randolph Hearst, and the truly preoccupied men who stockpile food wrappers and plastic cups. Blom's gripping narration and bizarre cast of eccentrics, visionaries, and fanatics provide a fascinating glimpse into how a pastime becomes an all consuming passion and an engrossing story of the collector as bridegroom, deliriously, obsessively happy, wed to his possessions, till death do us part.
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Editorial Reviews

The New Yorker
Taking as its inspiration Walter Benjamin's dictum that a collector's passion borders on "the chaos of memory," this curiously moving history argues that collecting is driven by the desire to control that chaos. Blom traces the development of collections since the Renaissance through lively portraits of famous collectors, like the Englishman Sir Thomas Phillips, who believed that he was meant to own one copy of every book in the world; the Austrian Franz Joseph Gall, who lined his walls with row upon row of skulls; and the American Alex Shear, who has amassed more than a hundred thousand relics of nineteen-fifties America. Blom shows that there is no limit to what can be collected, or to the intensity of the pursuit. Ultimately, he suggests, "the shadow looming over every cabinet" is a kind of willful, if unacknowledged, futility. To collect is to freeze the world in its tracks and hold it still. But if this succeeded what would be left to collect?
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. Agent, A.M. Heath. (Mar.) FYI: Allen Lane published the book in the U.K. this past July. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
In his first book, Blom provides an insightful look into cultural worldviews as revealed by collections and discusses the reasons-both clinical and personal-why people collect things. Whether designed to widen ideas of the world or to categorize every piece of information in an already established schema, collections can reveal a great deal about their collectors. Blom expands on these revelations with fascinating stories of the idiosyncratic collectors who helped shape knowledge and history by gathering rhinoceros horns, seashells, body parts, art objects, and a range of other natural and humanmade trinkets. He also theorizes that the frenzied single-mindedness collectors sometimes display may have connections to high-functioning autistic behaviors. While this conclusion is bound to be unpopular with collectors, Blom offers some compelling arguments. His occasional personal forays into the subject are less successful, but despite this and the occasionally clunky prose, the book is a worthy purchase. The extensive, judicious use of primary sources and well-chosen black-and-white illustrations increase the effectiveness of this title, which is recommended for any public or academic library.-Audrey Snowden, GSLIS (student), Simmons Coll., Boston Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Bezoars, crocodile teeth, sextants, first editions: if it can be collected, it figures in the pages of this entertaining debut, a history of passion-driven accumulation. Though only 32, European journalist and translator Blom writes with an old hand’s appreciation for the deep-seated impulse to gather things and make them one’s own. Much of his narrative consists of brief profiles of collectors possessed by that need, some quite uncontrollably. Among them are Spain’s King Philip II, who "sent out agents to bring him every relic they could find," amassing 7,000 items connected with Christian saints including 4 whole bodies and 144 heads, as well as putative pieces of the True Cross and the Crown of Thorns; American newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, who filled his California castle and apartments throughout the land with millions of dollars’ worth of art, inspiring Orson Welles’s movie Citizen Kane and pushing himself deep into debt in the bargain; English gardener John Tradescant, whose renowned collection of "Shining Stones or of Any Strange Shapes," animal skins, books, and drawings forms the basis of Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum (why it’s not called the Tradescantian Museum is a tale in itself); and Hollywood-based artist Alex Shear, who hoards such things as African-American Barbie dolls and Jell-O boxes in an effort to chronicle the essential childishness of American culture. Blom also explores with a light hand what their obsessions mean; he observes, for instance, that the act of collecting and classifying things allows the amasser to impose order on a patently disorderly universe and remarks on the odd correlation between uselessness and value, such that goods withpractical purposes are less prized than "a stamp that is no longer valid, an empty matchbox that missed the rubbish bin only because its last user had a poor aim." Learned but accessible, a pleasure for all readers bitten by the bug of impractical acquisition.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781585673773
  • Publisher: Overlook Press, The
  • Publication date: 2/24/2003
  • Pages: 345
  • Product dimensions: 6.30 (w) x 9.32 (h) x 1.16 (d)

Meet the Author

Philipp Blom was born in Hamburg in 1970. After studying in Vienna and Oxford, he worked in publishing as a journalist and translator in London and Paris.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Three Old Men 3
Pt. I A Parliament of Monsters
The Dragon and the Tartar Lamb 13
A Melancholy Ailment 27
An Ark Abducted 50
The Exquisite Art of Dr. Ruysch 60
Pt. II A Complete History of Butterflies
This Curious Old Gentleman 77
The Mastodon and the Taxonomy of Memory 92
Angelus Novus 98
The Greatness of Empires 109
An Elevator to the Heavens 124
Pt. III Incantations
Why Boiling People is Wrong 139
Three Flying Ducks 158
Anglers and Utopias 169
A Theatre of Memories 176
Pt. IV The Tower of Fools
A Veritable Vello-Maniac 197
Leporello and His Master 212
Mr. Soane is Not at Home 220
Epilogue: Plastic Cups and Mausoleums 232
Notes 237
Bibliography 256
Index 265
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