A Noble Madness
The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
“In this fascinating, witty, and provocative book, Delbourgo’s collectors range from emperors to scientists, from shopaholics to taxonomists, from bibliomaniacs to serial killers. Give it to the collector in your life, and watch the sparks fly!”—Cathy Gere, author of The Tomb of Agamemnon
A captivating history of obsessive collectors: from ancient looters and idolaters to fin de siècle decadents, Freudian psychos, and hoarders.
Collectors are often praised for their taste in art or contributions to science, and considered great public benefactors. But collectors have also been seen as dangerous obsessives who love objects too much. Why? From looters and idolaters to fin de siècle decadents and Freudian psychos, A Noble Madness is a captivating history of obsessive collectors from ancient times to today.
From Roman emperors lusting after statues to modern-day hoarders, award-winning author James Delbourgo tells the extraordinary story of fanatical collectors throughout history. He explains how the idea first emerged that when we look at someone’s collection, we see a portrait of their soul: complex, intriguing, yet possibly insane. What Delbourgo calls “the Romantic collecting self” has always lurked on the dark side of humanity.
But this dark side has a silver lining. Because obsessive collectors are driven by passion, not profit, they have been countercultural heroes in the modern imagination, defying respectability and taste in the name of truth to self.
A grand portrait gallery of collectors in all their decadent glory, A Noble Madness recounts the saga of the human urge to accumulate, from Caligula to Marie Antoinette, Balzac to Freud, Norman Bates to Andy Warhol. Collectors’ love of objects may be mad, even dangerous. But we want to believe their love’s a noble madness because by expressing that love, they are themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
