To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting by Philipp Blom
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD is to the history of collecting what Lytton Strachey's EMINENT VICTORIANS is to the Victorian age: not the most thorough treatment, but the most fun. It is a completely engrossing, idiosyncratic, ruminative, meandering, delightful, episodic exploration of the collecting mind from mediaeval times to the present - full of eccentrics, visionaries, heroes and nutcases. It is, like Alberto Manguel's A HISTORY OF READING or Charles Sprawson's THE HAUNTS OF THE BLACK MASSEUR, itself something of a work of art.