A Life Of Collecting

Unlike most collectors of European modernism, the Ganzes had the breadth of imagination to realize that certain young Americans were the true heirs of Picasso. With an unerring eye (sharpened by exhaustive study), they chose Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella at the beginning of their careers, and then moved on to champion Eva Hesse. In this book of essays by John Richardson, Leo Steinberg, David Sylvester, Judith Goldman, Roberta Bernstein, Linda Shearer, and others, we learn about the art and artists in the collection, as well as the risks and commitments the Ganzes made in establishing these artists we now hail as among the masters of contemporary art.

Winner of the Leo Gershoy Award Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize A Times Book of the Week When the British Museum opened its doors in 1759, it was the first free national public museum in the world. Collecting the World tells the story of the eccentric collector whose thirst for universal knowledge brought it into being. A man of insatiable curiosity and wide-ranging interests, Hans Sloane assembled a collection of antiquities, oddities, and artifacts from around the British Empire to form the most famous cabinet of curiosities of its time. With few curbs on his passion, he established a network of agents to supply him with objects from China, India, the Caribbean, and beyond. Wampum beads, rare manuscripts, a shoe made of human skin: nothing was off limits. The first biography of Sloane based on his complete writings, Collecting the World portrays one of the Enlightenment's most original luminaries. "A magnificent scholarly coup and an enthralling read... It conveys the excitement of original research as well as the thrill of tracking exotic curiosities to their source." --Sunday Times "Delbourgo's engrossing new biography situates Sloane within the welter of intellectual and political crosscurrents that marked his times." --New York Times Book Review "A superb biography--humane, judicious and as passionately curious as Sloane himself." --Times Literary Supplement "A superb book, enjoyably written, beautifully illustrated, and based on deep knowledge of the sources." --The Telegraph

Poetry. Madelyn Garner and Andrea Watson offer an intriguing glimpse into the anthropology of collecting—what people love, value, and even obsess about in the passionate and occasionally quirky world of collecting. This fascinating anthology offers poems by emerging and established writers, including Denise Duhamel, Kimiko Hahn, Jane Hirshfield, Pattiann Rogers, David Trinidad, Christopher Buckley, Jonathan Rice, and Gary Young. Introduced by Bill Brown, Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of English and the visual arts at the University of Chicago, a leading expert on the practice and art of collecting, the book provides crucial insights into the transformative nature of collecting through the singular lens of poetics. COLLECTING LIFE is a must-read for writers, artists, collectors, and educators.

From amassing sacred relics to collecting celebrity memorabilia, the impulse to hoard has gripped humankind throughout the centuries. But what is it that drives people to possess objects that have no conceivable use? To Have and To Hold is a captivating tour of collectors and their treasures from medieval times to the present, from a cabinet containing unicorn horns and a Tsar's collection of teeth to the macabre art of embalmer Dr. Frederick Ruysch, the fabled castle of William Randolph Hearst, and the truly preoccupied men who stockpile food wrappers and plastic cups. An engrossing story of the collector as bridegroom, deliriously, obsessively happy, wed to his possessions, till death do us part.

Find beauty. Find hope. Find your life of lovely. Annie F. Downs wants you to take each next step of life with excitement, heading forward with beauty and confidence. ​But what if the enemy is whispering lies that ​you are not smart enough, pretty enough, or rich enough? Or that ​you are too loud, too quiet, too thin, too fat, too much? What if you feel you don’t have what it takes to be who you really want to be? Personal yet powerful, A Life of Lovely offers young women honest stories, biblical truth, and courageous examples—all to encourage readers to persevere their way to hope. You will walk away excited about who you are becoming and challenged to look for lovely, fight to finish, and find the beautiful in your every day!

Databases have revolutionized nearly every aspect of our lives. Information of all sorts is being collected on a massive scale, from Google to Facebook and well beyond. But as the amount of information in databases explodes, we are forced to reassess our ideas about what knowledge is, how it is produced, to whom it belongs, and who can be credited for producing it. Every scientist working today draws on databases to produce scientific knowledge. Databases have become more common than microscopes, voltmeters, and test tubes, and the increasing amount of data has led to major changes in research practices and profound reflections on the proper professional roles of data producers, collectors, curators, and analysts. Collecting Experiments traces the development and use of data collections, especially in the experimental life sciences, from the early twentieth century to the present. It shows that the current revolution is best understood as the coming together of two older ways of knowing—collecting and experimenting, the museum and the laboratory. Ultimately, Bruno J. Strasser argues that by serving as knowledge repositories, as well as indispensable tools for producing new knowledge, these databases function as digital museums for the twenty-first century.