Thanks to Norton and Net Galley for allowing me to read an advance copy.

3.5 stars (rounded up)

On the whole, this is an enjoyable, readable investigation into the motivations behind collecting. Delbourgo spans history, giving examples of collectors and the views on collecting written by their contemporaries.

The author takes Freudian analysis as his backbone though, and I think the analysis suffers by looking so strongly through this lens. At the end though, he seems to pivot into what an outsider wants from a collection rather than what the collector wants. A topic like this isn't black or white but the book felt more like an aimless survey than a work with a point.

I enjoyed reading it, but I'd suggest taking it as a long form listicle with an intriguing curation of examples.

Throughout history people have guessed that very determined collectors are kind of crazy. The degree to which people have believed this has varied, but there does seem to be something "not quite right" about someone who devotes most of their waking hours to adding to their hoard.
This is an interesting tale of people who have collected everything from beanie babies to African art to insects to celebrities' garbage. It spans centuries of history but includes the modern response to hoarders.

Examples of Obsessive Collectors Across History
James Delbourgo, A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, August, 2025). Hardcover: $31.99, 6X9”. 288pp, 30 illustrations. ISBN: 978-0-393-54196-0.
****
“A captivating history of obsessive collectors: from ancient looters and idolaters to fin de siècle decadents, Freudian psychos, and hoarders.” It is suspicious that: “The ancient Roman world is filled with stories about people who loved art too much.” Archeologists or those forging artifacts to be more valuable would have been obsessed with stealing, or treasuring artifacts; but those who lived at the time would have just viewed art as simple decorations. For example, in the 1st century BC, Roman statesman Cicero prosecuted Gaius Verres in part for “plundering the island of Sicily”, arguing he was “a looter on the edge of madness” (10). The “idolaters” are explained in the Quran to have been accused of being “dupes of corrupt priests”: “those who hoard gold and silver instead of giving in God’s cause… will have a grievous punishment”. In other words, when people spent money on buying gold for themselves; they were not donating this residual income to the priests offering this advice (29). Regarding Freud, there is an analysis of Victor Fliescher’s novel The Collector (1920), which describes a “deranged collector”: when this collector meets a rival collector, he panics that he might be perceived as a relative “fool who has bought forgeries” (152). These are pretty interesting stories about collecting. Though I wish they went further in explaining just what role forgery, and other frauds play in creating this collecting-madness.
“Collectors are often praised for their taste in art or contributions to science, and considered great public benefactors. But collectors have also been seen as dangerous obsessives who love objects too much. Why?... From Roman emperors lusting after statues to modern-day hoarders, award-winning author James Delbourgo tells the extraordinary story of fanatical collectors throughout history. He explains how the idea first emerged that when we look at someone’s collection, we see a portrait of their soul: complex, intriguing, yet possibly insane. What Delbourgo calls ‘the Romantic collecting self’ has always lurked on the dark side of humanity. But this dark side has a silver lining. Because obsessive collectors are driven by passion, not profit, they have been countercultural heroes in the modern imagination, defying respectability and taste in the name of truth to self…” It “recounts the saga of the human urge to accumulate, from Caligula to Marie Antoinette, Balzac to Freud, Norman Bates to Andy Warhol.”
The romanticizing of this need to hoard is sleep-inducing. There are great marketers or salesmen behind every mad collector. Somebody is deliberately triggering this madness for profit. Detaching the act of selling from obsessive buying, and turning it into an internal psychological flaw, or grand trait does not really explain the center of this matter. But this is a curious perspective on a major problem that has mutilated history because selling forged history is more profitable than proving what the facts of history are.
--Pennsylvania Literary Journal: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-summer-2025/

Is collecting madness, a compulsion or a normal human expression? James Delbourgo's A Noble Madness: the Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now ostensibly focuses on this question, but much more of it focuses on the first two parts of that questions. The book begins with Ancient Rome before expanding to cover covetous royalty (European and Chinese), mad bookmen and acquisitive naturalists, among many others.

Through 13 chapters and an epilogue, Delbourgo spends time in many different regions and focuses on multiple perspectives. It is very much a survey history of major collectors and their collections, along with differing understandings of the motivations to collect. Some are portrayed as greedy, compulsive, or spoiled while a few others are regarded more as ahead of their, seeking to capture examples of creatures before extinction or gathering the ephemeral advertisements before they exist only in memory.

It is very readable, but does suffer some for its wide scope. Can you truly address the full history of humanity collecting in under 300 pages? Delbourgo certainly tries, but there is a clear focus on the morbid, controversial or compulsive, much more time is devoted to the fiction collectors such as Norman Bates. Isabella Gardner is mentioned several times, but not in a single section, instead a quote from her leads a chapter and her name comes up in a few different sections. One glaring oversight is not providing the counter point. Delbourgo is focused on the mad, greedy or compulsive, what would be considered now to be hoarders. Which is a shame, with a slight tweaking, a more balanced view could've included collections that document atrocities, the work of Charles L Blockson and his African American History collection or Marion Stokes who recorded an estimated 840,000 hours of televised content.

Yes collecting is something all children seem to do, and there are clear examples from history of collecting gone wrong, (Nazi art theft and anthropological Native American collections), but is the mad collector truly a necessary figure? Instead explore them individually, looking at what they gathered and the potential why, which Delbourgo does, but gets lost in the Freudian possibilities.

Recommended to readers of psychology, weird topic survey histories, or books with clear agendas.

This is not a book for me and not exactly what I was expecting. I did finish reading it and I did learn something new, but it was a slow read for me and didn’t pull me in. I was expecting the book to be about collecting in a narrower sense, but this book looks at a very broad range of what collecting means. I felt like some parts are too long and too detailed.

You walk into someone's home for the first time and the walls are adorned with taxidermized squirrels. Or the shelves are cluttered with beakers full of blood. Weird, right? Maybe it's more than weird, perhaps rising to creepy, red flag alarming, or fight or flight inducing. Yet these are some of the more extreme examples of the madness of collectors. Some are considered harmless while many are viewed with a suspicion that they're one bad day away from snapping and going postal.

James Delbourgo, English historian currently teaching at Rutgers University, argues in his upcoming 2025 book *A Noble Madness* (published by W.W. Norton & Co) that the topic of collecting has been a uniquely dynamic subject since the dawn of antiquity and the advent of writing. Our modern viewpoint of collectors as simple hoarders is likely influenced by both the modern commodification of everyday objects and society's increasing tendency to over diagnose mental illnesses.

A Noble Madness takes the reader on a wonderful journey through the stories of art plunderers (from Ancient Rome to Nazi Germany), bibliomaniacs, Enlightenment-era specimen hunters, and modern serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, to considering humanity's view of these obsessives as greedy thieves, imperialist menaces, and Freudian repressives. The historical vignettes are fascinating and Delbourgo's writing is crisp enough to make the reader want to read the book's entire bibliography.

Even for those of us nonplussed by the Industrial Age's "thing culture", collecting can blossom merely as an extension of sustained interest in something. The collection is more than just the objects; it can be representation of the psyche or of aesthetic beauty or any number of other abstract possibilities. One can't help but wonder where they fit on the spectrum of madness.

*"That underneath their veneer of reason and civility, collectors are febrile, volatile, and warped. The collector turns out to be an extraordinarily diagnostic figure in our collective cultural imagination, morphing from antiquity down to the present, constantly threatening to explode."*

Delbourgo asks of us if it is unreasonable for a human being to try and make sense of the world by controlling and ordering our surroundings. And is collecting anything but an attempt at finding order in chaos?