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(More customer reviews)Collecting things is a human trait that almost anyone participates in, whether it is a formal hobby like stamp collecting or just accumulating books or Toby jugs. Every now and then we hear about some poor fellow who has filled his house with a collection, usually of worthless stuff, so that he can do nothing but tunnel through the mass. This would have been the fate of Henry Wellcome, who collected a huge amount of valuable ethnographic and historically important items, but he had the money to keep the collection from impinging, much, upon his living quarters. Wellcome was obsessed with collecting all of human history, and this resulted in huge warehouses filled with crates jammed with a jumble of fetish items, spears, masks, tools, paintings, pestles, whole shopfronts and the shops behind them, walking sticks, and more. The mass of the collection can never be fully appreciated (and was not, even by him); when it was disbursed in the 1940s, there was, for example, an embarrassingly large number of weapons, so many that along with the good stuff there were six tons of swords, guns, cannon, helmets, and shields that were suitable only for scrap. Wellcome was sure his collection would prove to be a beacon of research, but in the fascinating _An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World_ (Oxford University Press), anthropologist and historian Frances Larson shows how Wellcome's pathological acquisitiveness doomed itself into making a collection so huge it was unusable, and how his great ambition blighted his life. It is a story of genuine tragedy.
The wealth he Wellcome made from pharmaceuticals he employed in building his collection. It was not a one-man operation; given the scope of his purchases, the wide regions from which they were obtained, and the need to store and preserve them, Wellcome required an army of helpers. Many of his doings he wanted kept secret, and bidding on items was often a cloak-and-dagger affair. His need for secrecy became pathological. Wellcome aspired to an academic appreciation for his collection (although he wrote only two papers about items within it). This would have meant that scholars would obtain access to the items in the collection, a simple requirement that he had difficulty accepting. Proposals for collaborating with academic institutions were met with a cool postponement; there would be plenty of time for such work when the collection was complete, and making it complete was his all-consuming (and illusory) goal. The secrecy extended even to the exhibit of the items. When he did open a museum, he only wanted doctors to come in, or if you weren't a doctor, you had to bring a note from your doctor.
The stance of mistrust may have poisoned his marriage, to a much younger woman whom he divorced in 1916. Wellcome suspected that she was having an affair. The collecting mania, however, certainly had worsened any romance between them. She was to write of their travels, "the greatest part of our time has been spent, as he well knows, in places I detested collecting curios." He was, for those who worked with him, a difficult taskmaster, insisting on secrecy and on driving hard bargains. Other tycoons spent their fortunes on, say, paintings that cost thousands of pounds; most of the items in Wellcome's collection cost only a few pounds, and if he could get a relic for shillings, he was thrilled. He never settled down from buying and storing, and the warehouses filled up with exhibits that would be exhibited to no one. He wanted to show every bit of human history with artifacts that pertained to all societies and endeavors, and surely he accumulated more towards that goal than anyone else ever could. Larson, however, has produced a sad picture of an unlikeable but driven man, whose unremitting goal of collecting precluded any usefulness of his collection.
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Richly illustrated throughout, including 8 pages of color plates, An Infinity of Things tells the story of the greatest private collection ever made, and the life of the man behind it. American-born Henry Wellcome made his millions as one of the world's first pharmaceutical entrepreneurs. Drawing on his massive wealth, he planned a great museum filled with treasures from all corners of the globe, charting the history of human health from prehistory to the present day. Demonstrating what can happen when a collector's aspirations are left unconstrained by wealth, Frances Larson explores Wellcome's life through his possessions, revealing the many tensions in his character: between his talents as a businessman and his desire for scholarly recognition; his curiosity and his perfectionism; and his philanthropic aspirations and his drive for personal glory. During the opening decades of the twentieth century he acquired a collection so large that later generations of staff took to describing its contents by the ton. But Wellcome's museum was never finished, and his collection was still stored in vast warehouses when he died, unseen and incomplete.
