Obsessive, compulsive behaviour

The young author of this survey of our childlike passion for grabbing a thing and shouting ‘it’s mine!’ is good company, generating in easy-going prose the scholarly tensions of an auction room. He calls collecting ‘Noah’s task’: things must not be allowed to perish. The inanimate and the humble are just as much in need of rescue as endangered species. Today Robert Opie has proved the point no less tellingly in his amassment of domestic ephemera in tin or cardboard than his parents Peter and Iona did in their collections of chapbooks, toys, rhymes. Preserving something ‘beyond our random existences’ is a labour of love, extending the life of the present and lending it depth. These pages examine the snapping-up of unconsidered trifles as man’s (or a number of rich or good men’s) fight against mortality.

Each of the 15 chapters gives a thumbnail portrait of one or two particular fanatics over the half millennium just past.