by:
Blom, Philipp

Publisher:
Overlook Press
Published:February 24, 2003
ISBN:1585673773
Format:Hardcover
Pages:345

Description: 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 bandw illus. and photos.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
It does take one to known one. Journalist Blom waxes lyrical about the art and craft of collecting--and the results of collectors' labors. His own interest started with his grandfather's "The Yellow Finch" shop in Amsterdam, and here he relates stories of some of the oddest hobbies-of-passion known to history. Prince Rudolf of Habsburg, later Holy Roman Emperor, amassed amazing things of nature--a musk pouch, Seychelles nut, a bezoar (a poison antidote), among other "miracles," housed in a huge... read more

Book Description
The cabinets of obsessive Renaissance collectors were filled with rhinoceros horns encrusted with rubies and jaws of gigantic fish, stuffed birds in the most extraordinary colors, and glorious sea shells of all descriptions. Today's collectors amass everything from Picassos to Pez dispensers. But why? In To Have and To Hold, Philipp Blom explores the history of the collecting passion from the Renaissance to the present.

Every collected object, be it a matchbook or a martyr's fingernail, carries a meaning that transcends the object itself; it is a totem. Single-minded pursuit turns the collector into cultural anthropologist. For Alex Shear, his collection from the post-War period-from vintage radios, fallout shelters, and Jell-O boxes to elaborate hair drying contraptions, bobby pins, and Barbie dolls-preserves an age of innocence in the form of the familiar household items that served as the set props for the 1950s American Dream. Alex's Renaissance counterpart is King Rudolph II, whose collection of the art and exotica of his day (housed in his ever-expanding castle in Prague) was breathtaking in its complexity and sophistication, representing the magnificent profusion of the treasures of a world newly explored.

Out of this glittering diversity of material Blom distills the themes underlying this seemingly elusive passion: conquest and possession, chaos and memory, a void to be filled, and the awareness of our own mortality. What emerges is the story of the collector as bridegroom, deliriously, obsessively happy, wed to his possessions, till death do us part.