TO HAVE AND TO HOLD "is to the history of collecting what Lytton Strachey's EMINENT VICTORIANS is to the Victorian age: not the most thorough treatment, but the most fun." It is a completely engrossing, idiosyncratic, ruminative, meandering, delightful, episodic exploration of the collecting mind from mediaeval times to the present - full of eccentrics, visionaries, heroes and nutcases. It is, like Alberto Manguel's A HISTORY OF READING or Charles Sprawson's THE HAUNTS OF THE BLACK MASSEUR, itself something of a work of art.
- ISBN10 0140294805
- ISBN13 9780140294804
- Publish Date 3 July 2003 (first published 25 July 2002)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 6 June 2007
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Penguin Books Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 288
- Language English