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

AT FIRST I was anxious that the chapters in Philipp Blom’s admirable To Have and To Hold wouldn’t live up to their titles. I shouldn’t have worried. “A veritable vello-maniac” and “Why boiling people is wrong” give a glimpse of the twists and turns of this outstanding account of collectors and collecting, of “this strange and beautiful obsession”.

Blom’s 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’s nothing that can’t 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, “on order of the Emperor Franz II, he was skinned”. His skin was mounted on a wooden frame and displayed in the emperor’s 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’s account of Elias Ashmole’s mean fight with John Tradescant’s 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.