A review by tessisreading2
Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present by Erin Thompson

3.0

Interesting and readable - I got through this in about two days - but kind of all over the place: it read like a longform article that had been expanded into a book, with extra examples and a lot of padding added, as opposed to something that needed to be a book. The long chronological span of collecting covered also meant that the book felt unbalanced at times; there's a lot of information about the eighteenth century, probably because the looting/collecting was well-documented and eighteenth century antiquarians loved to hear themselves talk (slash read their own writing), but at the same time Thompson will then dart back to the Medicis or forward to Getty because the book is not organized chronologically but by what the collectors were doing.