James Delbourgo’s “A Noble Madness” is a brilliant, droll study in the shifting profile and consistent obsession of the stop-at-nothing, buy-or-die collector. Mr. Delbourgo, a history professor at Rutgers University, finds that the collecting mentality, like most things, divides into ancient and modern. The ancients believed that those who loved too much were possessed by gods; Suetonius wrote that Caligula, who believed he was a god, once ordered his troops to fill their helmets with seashells, the “spoils of the ocean.” We moderns, Mr. Delbourgo argues, have gone from theories of “demonic possession to accusations of superstition, obsession, sexual neurosis, and pathological greed down to the recent invention of the medical term ‘hoarding disorder.’” Read more
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