A passion for collecting - Caroline Clifton-Mogg

The passion for collecting – whether it is of fine paintings, wonderful artefacts or everyday ephemera – is about the hunt, the satisfaction of tracking down the perfect object to enhance your life. For many, the desire to collect is instinctive, a habit that never leaves but that pushes on from one great find to the next, and often from one collecting enthusiasm to a new one.

This book reveals the personalities and the collecting fervour of some of the most eminent and unusual collectors of the present and the past. There are dedicated antiquarians and collectors interested in the utilitarian or the miniature; explorers who search the world for exotic objects; and others who forge ingenious plans for collections they have inherited. There are collectors who are perfectionists, decorators, naturalists or simply enthusiasts, and all their finds are discussed and illustrated.

The collectors featured here live with their treasures displayed around them in their homes, rather than stored away in boxes. Their varied and original arrangements of the pieces provide an insight into a unique style of interior decoration, performed with a keen eye for texture, colour and shape. The book illustrates extraordinary visual worlds, some cool and posed and others teeming with objects of interest, and talks to the passionate people who create them – and it is bound to pass on the colleting bug to all those who enter its pages.