The Cultures of Collecting

London: Reaktion Books, 1997. Later printing. Octavo with grey and white pictorial wraps; viii, 312 pages: illustrations; bibliography; 24 cm Near fine; slightest rubbing to extremities; clean and tight. Paperback. ISBN: 9780948462504, 9780948462511

Offering a spectrum of approaches to the phenomenon of collecting from the 16th century to the present, this book covers the collecting of any sort of material objects. It not only deals with the physical objects, but examines the organization of ideas and intellectual models of collecting. Contents: The system of collecting / Jean Baudrillard. "Unless you do these crazy things": an interview with Robert Opie. Identity parades / John Windsor. Collecting and collage-making: the case of Kurt Schwitters / Roger Cardinal. Telling objects: a narrative perspective in collecting / Mieke Bal. Licensed curiosity: Cook's Pacific voyages / Nicholas Thomas. From treasury to museum: the collections of the Austrian Habsburgs / Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. A collector's model of desire: the house and museum of Sir John Soane / John Elsner. Cabinets of transgression: Renaissance collections and the incorporation of the new world / Anthony Alan Shelton. Death and life, in that order, in the works of Charles Willson Peale / Susan Stewart. "Mille e tre": Freud and collecting / John Forrester. Collecting Paris / Naomi Schor.bishop