'Curious Collectors, Collected Curiosities: An Interdisciplinary Study' asks its readers to enter into an investigation of the nature of collecting as an aesthetic exercise. Spanning the sixteenth century through today, this book gathers together the work of current scholars to re-envision the task of collectors and their collections in broad strokes. Each chapter appropriates the idea of a cabinet of curiosity in order to expand its boundaries of meaning and to complicate our understanding of the acts of display and observation. These chapters also demonstrate that collecting is a universal trope which nevertheless depends on time and place for its particular expressions. Whether the collection is made up of literary texts and criticism, visual art, including mechanical reproductions, taxidermy and photography, historical travelogues, museum exhibitions, blockbuster films, or airline in-flight briefing cards, it conveys an urgent relevance to our consumer age, in which information is abundant and attention is a commodity.

A history of the human drive to collect things considers how various objects carry meanings of significance to their collectors, tracing popular items of pursuit during the Renaissance and other eras while discussing the themes underlying collecting behaviors. Reprint.

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The author takes readers on a tour of his personal museum of natural oddities and optical illusions as he explores the imaginative origins of art and science, in a work nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.