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To Have and To Hold by Philipp Blom, Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 拢18.99, ISBN 0713994762 Reviewed by Maggie McDonald

AT FIRST I was anxious that the chapters in Philipp Blom鈥檚 admirable To Have and To Hold wouldn鈥檛 live up to their titles. I shouldn鈥檛 have worried. 鈥淎 veritable vello-maniac鈥� and 鈥淲hy boiling people is wrong鈥� give a glimpse of the twists and turns of this outstanding account of collectors and collecting, of 鈥渢his strange and beautiful obsession鈥�.

Blom鈥檚 scholarly approach bares both the strangeness and the beauty in the amassing of objects. From a single haunted survivor of the Holocaust who was obsessed with book learning, to the tooth-collecting Peter the Great, he shows that there鈥檚 nothing that can鈥檛 be collected. Even mortal remains. After a childhood of slavery in the 18th century, the brilliant Angelo Soliman became a soldier, a courtier and a tutor of Austrian princes. He even became a Mason. After his death, 鈥渙n order of the Emperor Franz II, he was skinned鈥�. His skin was mounted on a wooden frame and displayed in the emperor鈥檚 museum. Soliman was black, and in death he became an object.

Blom shows blind acquisitiveness and conspicuous displays of worldly goods giving way to the scientific ordering of knowledge (Carolus Linnaeus inspired many), designed to educate. This sounds stately, but the passion for possession is anything but. After reading Blom鈥檚 account of Elias Ashmole鈥檚 mean fight with John Tradescant鈥檚 widow for his collection, anyone going to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford would feel distinctly uncomfortable. And those vell-maniacs? Blom takes you into the world of the obsessive book collectors, some driven to crime to get their prizes.