A Cabinet Of Curiosities: The Literature Of Collecting

“When a valued, cultured and elegant friend sent me his new book and I was about to open it, I caught myself in the act of straightening my tie.”

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

IBEGAN TO REALLY LOOK AT BOOKS when I stopped reading them. I became a lapsed reader. (For a bibliophile who occasionally wrote a book column or two this posed a problem, but I cunningly resolved it and you will soon see how.) But books were an old and compulsive habit with me, so I routinely stopped at bookstores and bought them. Or borrowed from friends and libraries. At home, I would pick up the book at hand, read a little, stop, and instead notice the cover or the way the paper felt or the binding. If I continued reading, it was the title page verso or the colophon that I read.

Holding a book but not actually reading it gave me time (and put me in the mood) to reflect on the act of reading and the physicality of the book. (Didn’t that high priest of scholar-collectors, Walter Benjamin, once make a case for the true bibliophile as the one who never reads her books?) I began to obsess over first editions, bibliographical points, printing and book history, and the culture and tradition of bibliophily. When browsing in bookstores I was drawn most to books that addressed the passion for reading and book collecting (Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, Nicholas Basbanes’ A Gentle Madness, Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading).

I discovered that this literary sub-genre had a name: books on books, or books about books. Suddenly, I was reading again! And writing about these books: bibliomemoirs, bibliofiction, travels in the bookworld, true tales of bibliomania, and bibliomysteries. A shelf-row of books about books in my book-crammed apartment soon turned into a whole shelf devoted to books on books. I think one reason why absorption in this genre reignited the longing to read was that it made my reading deeply personal, idiosyncratic and self-reflexive. These books described an interior world I knew intimately: the inner life of a reader. A familiar act: reading. An object I grew up with: the book. A second home: the bookstore.

Like Yambo, Umberto Eco’s tireless reader in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, this was about the reader as hero. From such bookish self-reflexivity it is but a short step to making your book collection, your personal library, and the pursuit of book collecting the subject of your inquiry. My quest brought me to the literature of collecting, a tiny but intriguing sub-genre of the larger one of books on books. Standing amidst my groaning, overflowing bookshelves, I paused to ask myself, not for the first time, why I collect.

The answer is complex, and though there are poetic and erudite accounts about book collectors and what they collect (Philipp Blom’s To Have and To Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, Stephen Calloway’s Obsessions: Collectors and Their Passions), there is very little critical discussion on why they collect. More recently, however, academics have begun to show greater interest in making critical inquiries into the subject of collecting. There are now a handful of scholarly and theoretical books that examine the cultural meanings of collecting.

Interestingly, their primary focus has been not books but museum collections: the burgeoning field of museum anthropology or museum studies that looks at questions of connoisseurship and display. Leah Dilworth, editor of the anthology Acts of Possession: Collecting in America (2003), notes that this has resulted in meta museum studies—museums studying their own collecting practices. (As an extreme example, in one essay here titled ‘The Serial Killer as Collector,’ cultural theory is used to understand the ‘collections’ of the serial killers in the movies Kiss the Girls and The Silence of the Lambs.) “The appeal of collecting,” says Dilworth, “is that completeness and closure are impossible…it is a process of continual inquiry and endless desire.”

The ur-text of collecting is Jean Baudrillard’s essay, ‘The System of Collecting.’ Walter Benjamin’s ‘Unpacking My Library’ too has near cult status among bibliophiles. Other more modern founding documents in the literature of collecting are Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984), Susan Pearce’s Interpreting Objects and Collections (1994), Werner Muensterberger’s Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives (1996) and John Elsner and Roger Cardinal’s The Cultures of Collecting (1994).  Richard Wendorf’s The Literature of Collecting & Other Essays (2008), however, is my pick for the most illuminating and absorbing scholarly book on collecting, drawing on literary theory, psychoanalysis and fiction to dig deep into why we collect and its veiled subtexts.

Wendorf masterfully criss-crosses between theoretical texts devoted to collecting and the focus on collecting in prose fiction (John Fowles’ The Collector, Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector, Henry James’ The Aspern Papers). He begins with an exploration of Jean Baudrillard’s famous work on the subject where the writer comes to the conclusion that the objects we collect mirror us, are material representations of the self, and thus in the multiplicity of collecting, the self is extended “to the very limits of the collection. Here lies the whole miracle of collecting. For it is invariably oneself that one collects.”

And a collection, Baudrillard is quick to remind us, is never initiated to be completed. What’s more, he warns us that the collecting impulse is regressive, the passion, escapist and the gratification, illusory. Why regressive? You invest in objects because investing in human relationships is hard and tricky. Also, when you are down and need to recover, you seek the company of objects. The book as the perfect pet. The elusive or missing book becomes valuable by its absence. “The collector’s passion is predicated on pursuit, not completion,” notes Wendorf.

Baudrillard balances this dramatic reading of the need to collect with how objects offer consolation in a world characterised by faltering religious and ideological authorities; objects absorb our anxieties about time and death. Wendorf explicates and glosses each of Baudrillard’s intriguing, melodramatic hypotheses (collecting as a jealously system—other people can’t have it; confining beauty in order to savour it in isolation; how the pursuit of collecting displaces and even abolishes real time, and so on), and pushes further to look at other scholarly literature devoted to collecting, such as Werner Muensterberger’s psychoanalytic study of this ‘unruly passion.’ For Muensterberger, collectibles are toys that grown-ups take seriously.

It is left to three women, three Susans to be exact—Susan Sontag, Susan Stewart and Susan Pearce—to say more pleasant things about collecting. The hero of Sontag’s novel The Volcano Lover trusts things because they don’t change their nature. Wendorf quotes from her: “Rare things have intrinsic value, people [have] the value your own need obliges you to assign to them.” Pearce urges us to understand the things we collect because they bring us closer to self knowledge; they are our other selves. (And I should like to add, with some beautiful books, our better selves).

Stewart says collecting offers the fantasy—through the ritualised, bibliophilic activity of arranging and rearranging a shelf display, pursuing absent books, trying to complete a collection—that you are a producer more than a consumer of objects. Related to this is the feeling of being able to fashion and control your environment. Walter Benjamin famously said that a collector’s passion rests on ‘the chaos of memory’ and this dictum could be extended to seeing collecting as a desire to control this chaos.

For Thomas Tanselle, for instance, a collection is a magic circle: a quest for order and ‘a feeling for mastery’ are at the heart of collecting.  The most transcendent explanation that Wendorf takes us to is the one offered by Philipp Blom: the collector’s devotion infuses life into these dead objects, forming a bridge “between our limited world and an infinitely richer one, that of history or art, of charisma or of holiness,” a world, he concludes, “of ultimate authenticity and thus a profoundly romantic utopia.”

While granting the views of Baudrillard and other theorists who see collecting as a “glorious, if illusory, gratification,” Wendorf counters their arguments with his own—and it is his reading that I most empathise with. He notes that there is a richer, more variegated texture to book collecting than that allowed by the theorists who don’t fully explore the complex relationship between things and owners. Collecting is based upon “desire, curiosity, knowledge, observation, patience and pursuit.” It is a way of finding oneself. Wendorf writes, “I see personal collecting in particular as part of the complicated project of self-projection, self-fashioning, and self-fulfilment.”

Another elegant, beautifully written and idiosyncratic work of collecting scholarship is Judith Pascoe’s The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (2006). It’s not a book that surfaces at once when exploring the scholarship on collecting because it isn’t academic or populist but a rare, pretty thing that won’t be caged like the hummingbird on its cover. I wasn’t surprised, then, when at some point in the book she says, “Academic writing often does a poor job of capturing the sensuous appeal of collecting.”

When I stumbled on it by chance, I nearly put it away assuming it had to do more with stuffed birds as museum artefacts. But once I started, I couldn’t stop reading Pascoe’s lyrical introduction which begins with an account of a self-styled, self-made Percy Bysshe Shelley collector who, in 1898, buys a beautifully-crafted Italian guitar that the Romantic poet once owned. (He eventually gives it away to the Bodleian library.) Edward Silsbee became the basis for Henry James’ protagonist in The Aspern Papers. Collecting things once touched by the Romantic poets had just become an obsession; people went after Shelley watch fobs, Shelley snuffboxes, and Shelley hair. “There may also be extant,” Pascoe records, “or so it is hoped, a volume of Keats’ Poems found in the drowned Shelley’s pocket. This sodden volume was seen in Shelley’s jacket when his body washed up on shore.”

Another collector, Fred Holland Day, a Keats enthusiast, owned a framed portrait of Keats with a lock of his hair under the glass, and a series of letters the poet wrote to his beloved Fanny Brawne. But his golden treasure, the high point of his collection, was a copy of Keats’ 1817 Poems inscribed to Wordsworth. Judith Pascoe’s interest in all this is to “read romantic era collecting practice in the context of romantic poetry, to reveal the entanglement of literary and collecting aesthetics.” It wasn’t until the late 18th century that collecting was democratised and individuals began private collections of their own. Until then collecting was a sport for the rich and the aristocratic. (This led eventually to the Victorian institutional practice of opening public museums.)

Pascoe shows us how the philosophical and literary movement of Romanticism spurred the idea of collecting with its strong aesthetic notions of devotion, beauty, and the fetishising of objects. She explores the grip that “objects have over their owners and the ways in which romantic structures of feeling—a longing for permanence, a fascination with perfect beauty, a preoccupation with authenticity, a propensity for grandiose endeavours—contribute to this hold.”

The Cultures of Collecting, is a collection of essays on the psychology, history and theory of the compulsion to collect. I’ve already mentioned how, in the psychoanalytic writings of Baudrillard and others, collecting is viewed as a pathology, linked to obsession and fetishism. There’s an interesting essay in this anthology that reveals what an obsessive-compulsive collector Sigmund Freud was. He collected antiquities which, by the time he died in September 1939, numbered 3,000 pieces. Apparently he kept them in the two rooms where he worked (and he always had a Vishnu figurine on his desk). Susan Stewart examines the work of the painter Charles Willson Peale, who is a key figure in understanding the evolution of museum collecting: the museum he founded in 1786 is considered the first to be ever set up in the United States.

Peale made a sort of self-portrait that is today an iconic image for collecting and collectors, and which you find reproduced in most literature of collecting: ‘The Artist In His Museum,’ 1822. You see him raising a curtain to reveal his collection. In the foreground, the giant jaw and tibia of a mastodon can be seen. Further inside, a woman is holding up her hands in astonishment at the mounted giant mastodon. Peale developed his museum, says Stewart, “as an antidote to war’s losses, and as a gesture against disorder and the extinction of knowledge.”

In their introduction, the editors come back to this idea of collecting as a stay against time using a most unusual and thrilling example:

Noah was the first collector. Adam had given names to the animals, but it fell to Noah to collect them…the collection is the unique bastion against the deluge of time. And Noah, perhaps alone of all collectors, achieved the complete set, or so at least the Bible would have us believe. Noah represents the extreme case of the collector: he is one who places his vocation in the service of a higher cause, and who suffers the pathology of completeness at all costs…In the myth of Noah as ur-collector resonates all the themes of collecting itself: desire and nostalgia, saving and loss, the urge to erect a permanent and complete system against the destructiveness of time.

If I earlier harboured a grand notion of myself as a collector, these accounts showed me that at best I was a dilettante. To be a collector of the order described in these books, I would have to be a ‘completist,’ teetering between mastery and madness. (I know a retired IAS officer in Chennai who took years to collect all the Booker books and the Modern Library series and then gave them away to his daughter so he could begin collecting them all over again.)

What I am, I guess, is an amateur bibliographer. The great collectors are, of course, the most passionate bibliographers, chasing after the actual object and learning from it, such as Bruce Kahn, a lawyer-collector whose deep and complete collection of all material related to Jim Harrison (first editions, early states, variant editions such as proofs/advance reading copies, letters) made it possible to recently create the first official Harrison bibliography.

The life and practices of these collectors and the politics of collecting seduces me, instructs me, reveals to me my own relationship to a lifetime of reading and pursuing books. This, then, is the inner life of one reader: from re-reader to lapsed reader, to finally, when all you can read are books about books: a meta-reader.