A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now

This rollicking survey from historian Delbourgo (Collecting the World) traces the archetype of the collector as it twists and turns throughout the ages. The collector is an “extraordinarily diagnostic figure” in “our collective cultural imagination,” Delbourgo asserts, mapping the collector’s evolving image over time from looter to hoarder and everything in between (including, in some feistier periods, idolater and libertine). He shows that people have pretty consistently thought there was something a little strange about these figures, and readers won’t be disinclined to disagree, as Delbourgo spotlights an art collector who paid $20,000 to have sex with an artist on film, an obsessive 19th-century heir who wrote, “I WISH TO OWN ONE COPY OF EVERY BOOK IN THE WORLD!!!,” and the vicissitudes of Jeffrey Dahmer’s bone altar. Delbourgo traces the more “noble” aspects of collecting all the way back to the Ming dynasty, where collectors were described as possessing a complex combination of compulsion and sophistication. He also astutely ties collecting into larger cultural movements, noting that collections often generate opposition, from Protestants critiquing Catholic icons to Red Guards smashing Ming vases. Delbourgo has a great eye for crackling vintage quotes (“One cannot befriend a man without obsessions, for he lacks deep emotion,” one 17th-century Chinese essayist writes). Readers will enjoy this whip-smart history. (Aug.)