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,…
