"This book is . . . a romantic history of romantic collecting. It takes seriously, and by necessity shares, the tendency of romantic histories to dwell upon their own fragmentariness, on the impossibility of capturing an intact history. . . . It traces the particular ways in which objects stepped into the lives of romantic collectors, and also the ways in which the objects moved on." from the IntroductionIn the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the activity of collecting became democratized and popularized, allowing all kinds of people to become caught up in the collecting...