The Urge to Collect (Paperback)
Motives, Obsessions and Tensions
Pages: 106
Illustrations: 24fc
ISBN: 9789464262308
Published: 15th January 2024
Casemate UK Academic
(click here for international delivery rates)
Order within the next 1 hour, 43 minutes to get your order processed the next working day!
Need a currency converter? Check XE.com for live rates
Why do we collect? Where does the urge to collect come from? This book explores the phenomenon of collecting in various contexts. Collecting is an illustration of a strong human-thing entanglement. It can be caused by psychological incentives that are deeply rooted in human doubts and anxieties. It is also related to building a pleasant, unthreatening, and even paradisical, environment to compensate for the uncertainties of everyday life.The chapters in this book range from psychological perspectives in the Habsburg empire to Rococo collecting in France, from a fanatic English book collector to a 16th/17th century encyclopaedic Dutch collector. And finally the fascinating story of Baron Edmond de Rothschild’s boxes.The contributions to this book were first presented as papers at the seminar "The Psychology of Collecting" in June 2022, organised by the Interdisciplinary Research Group “Museums, Collections and Society” of Leiden University, Netherlands.