To Have And To Hold: An Intimate History Of Collectors and Collecting [Hardcover]

Philipp Blom (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 24, 2003

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 seashells 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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

From 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?
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 345 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover (February 24, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585673773
• ISBN-13: 978-1585673773
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,093,267 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stories and more.., February 17, 2007

By 

Stephen Balbach (Ashton, MD United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: To Have And To Hold: An Intimate History Of Collectors and Collecting (Hardcover)

At first I thought this was going to be a survey of some eccentric collectors in history, on which is does not disappoint, but it turns out to be a lot richer and contain some real pearls of wisdom about life in general, and flashes of historical insight.

Reading through the chapters of this book was a lot like rummaging through a private collectors cabinet of curiosities. The chapter titles alone don't provide direction and only after a few pages does it begin to reveal its treasure. Chapters cover aspects of collecting as diverse as: people who collected experiences with women (Casanova), the collecting of body parts (religious relics), collecting memories, American billionaires who bought up European heritage (JP Morgan, Hearst), collectors of mass-produced items (milk bottles, food wrappers), Princes and Kings such as Rudolf of Hapsburg (17th C) who filled his castle with the worlds greatest collections and slowly went mad, collecting as a madness, as a substitute for love, as a form of autism, as psychology, as crime - and in the end, as a warning to all those who take it too far.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing and fascinating, February 22, 2007

By 

Joy Kearney (The Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: To Have And To Hold: An Intimate History Of Collectors and Collecting (Hardcover)

This is a book that takes you on a fascinating journey, is an enjoyable read and is also historically well-researched, so it can therefore be used by the student or academic as a useful reference. I came upon it quite by accident but now find it a very useful addition to my bookshelf. The story of the Ashmolean Museum's foundation was one of my particular favourites and really made my blood boil! Such stories are not often told about museum collections! I take my hat off to the author!

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worlds of wonder, May 30, 2003

By 

Carlos Arribas (Astoria, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: To Have And To Hold: An Intimate History Of Collectors and Collecting (Hardcover)

Absorbing and beautifully written, with a great bibliography to lead you on in your travels through this fascinating genre. Blom does for the general subject of collecting what Basbanes did for bibliophilia in A Gentle Madness. Well worth the read.