The acquisition of objects is close to the heart of what it is to be human. In the world of the collector this acquisition is divorced from utility, becoming its own, endlessly varied justification. Philipp Blom examines the various causes and forms of the collecting impulse, from the joy of identifying and satisfying a need to possess, to the creation of comforting taxonomies.

To Have and to Hold : An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting

BLOM, Philipp

Humor & Entertainment

Penguin??Books

Europe, 1900–1914: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpowers. The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele—but rather in the fifteen vertiginous years preceding World War I.
In this short span of time, a new world order was emerging in ultimately tragic contradiction to the old. These were the years in which the political and personal repercussions of the Industrial Revolution were felt worldwide: Cities grew like never before as people fled the countryside and their traditional identities; science created new possibilities as well as nightmares; education changed the outlook of millions of people; mass-produced items transformed daily life; industrial laborers demanded a share of political power; and women sought to change their place in society—as well as the very fabric of sexual relations.
From the tremendous hope for a new century embodied in the 1900 World's Fair in Paris to the shattering assassination of a Habsburg archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, historian Philipp Blom chronicles this extraordinary epoch year by year. Prime Ministers and peasants, anarchists and actresses, scientists and psychopaths intermingle on the stage of a new century in this portrait of an opulent, unstable age on the brink of disaster.
Beautifully written and replete with deftly told anecdotes, The Vertigo Years brings the wonders, horrors, and fears of the early twentieth century vividly to life.

The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914

History

Americas

Basic Books

The flourishing of radical philosophy in Baron Thierry Holbach's Paris salon from the 1750s to the 1770s stands as a seminal event in Western history. Holbach's house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring, bringing together such original minds as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ferdinando Galiani, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Guillaume Raynal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
In A Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom retraces the fortunes of this exceptional group of friends. All brilliant minds, full of wit, courage, and insight, their thinking created a different and radical French Enlightenment based on atheism, passion, reason, and truly humanist thinking. A startlingly relevant work of narrative history, A Wicked Company forces us to confront with new eyes the foundational debates about modern society and its future.

A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment

Europe

When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: the old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The world hurtled forward on gears and crankshafts, and terrifying new ideologies arose from the wreckage of past belief. In Fracture, critically acclaimed historian Philipp Blom argues that in the aftermath of World War I, citizens of the West directed their energies inwards, launching into hedonistic, aesthetic, and intellectual adventures of self-discovery. It was a period of both bitter disillusionment and visionary progress. From Surrealism to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West; from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to theoretical physics, and from Art Deco to Jazz and the Charleston dance, artists, scientists, and philosophers grappled with the question of how to live and what to believe in a broken age. Morbid symptoms emerged simultaneously from the decay of World War I: progress and innovation were everywhere met with increasing racism and xenophobia. America closed its borders to European refugees and turned away from the desperate poverty caused by the Great Depression. On both sides of the Atlantic, disenchanted voters flocked to Communism and fascism, forming political parties based on violence and revenge that presaged the horror of a new World War. Vividly recreating this era of unparalleled ambition, artistry, and innovation, Blom captures the seismic shifts that defined the interwar period and continue to shape our world today.

Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

A Wicked Company tells the remarkable story of Baron Thierry Holbach's Parisian salon, an epicenter of freethinking that brought together the greatest minds of the 18th century. Over wine-soaked dinner parties, the finest intellectuals of the Western world—figures such as Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole, and Benjamin Franklin—matched wits and scandalized one another with their own ever-more-provocative ideas. Writers of genius all, full of wit and courage (but also personal contradictions, doubts, conflicts of conscience, and their fair share of open arguments and love affairs), this group of friends embodied an astonishing radicalism in European thought, so uncompromising and bold that its bracing, liberating, humanist vision has still not been fully realized. As acclaimed historian Philipp Blom shows, these thinkers' analysis of our culture remains as valid as it was then, and has lost little of its potential to shock—or to force us to confront with new eyes debates about our society and its future.

Wicked Company

The lives of the tsars and their subjects from 1855 to 1918, told through rare archival photographs The Russian Empire was among the most mysterious of the world’s great powers, profoundly torn between a rural population living almost medieval lives and industrial and social change in the cities. The tsar’s gigantic realm struggled with the advent of modernity and with its own internal contradictions between Asia and Europe, faith and science, different ethnic groups, and the divergent interests of the aristocracy, the middle classes, the urban workers, and the rural poor: a continent of contradictions from abject poverty to fairy-tale wealth captured by authors from Tolstoy to Chekhov, from Gogol to Gorky. Twilight of the Romanovs opens a door into the world of pre-revolutionary Russia using original photographs taken during the last decades of Romanov rule. They include remarkable color images created using an early three-color-plate technique that brings the remote past to life. Our companions on this journey include the Scottish photographer William Carrick, Americans George Kennan and Murray Howe, the German-Russian Carl Bulla, Sergey Produkin-Gorsky, and the writers Leonid Andreyev and Anton Chekhov, together with many anonymous others. These photographs are snapshots of a vanished world, yet they reveal a surprising continuity: despite the subsequent revolution, faces, buildings, and landscapes still resonate with those who see them a century and more later. 360 illustrations, 114 in color

Twilight of the Romanovs: A Photographic Odyssey Across Imperial Russia

Arts & Photography

Buckley, Veronica

Photography & Video

Thames&Hudson

The definitive book on Austrian wine--"the best-kept secret of the wine world," according to the author. 
The Wines of Austria provides a complete introduction to the fine wines of Austria, which are beginning to appear on the lists of serious wine merchants. A country that produces several superb varieties, Austria is now becoming known for its wines, which are of a similar quality but are much more affordably priced than comparable wines from France and Germany. 
Starting with the history of Austrian wine, going back to the Celts and the Romans and working his way up to the technological advances of the present day, Philipp Blom examines the regions in which top wines are made and focuses on the growers and varieties in each area. From Wachau to Styria, the Kamptal to the Burgenland, this is a book for all wine lovers who want to broaden their scope and tantalize their palates by learning all about the exciting wines now available from Austrian vineyards.

The Wines of Austria

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Beverages & Wine

Faber&Faber

Collecting is one of the most common pastimes, and can often become a passion bordering on the obsessive. Our familiarity with the pursuit, however, obscures the questions at its heart: why do people amass things that have no use? What drives them to spend time and money getting hold of a single stamp, an unusual beermat, or a rare doll, only to put it in a folder or on a shelf? Why do we feel the need to possess these items, and why is it not enough to know that they exist in a museum, or somewhere else? In this book, Philip Blom delves into the history of the collecting passion and explores it through a series of interlinked portraits, stories and discoveries, each characteristic of a period. What emerges is the story of a human quest more intimately linked with our primal needs than many would have thought possible. Investigating the history of collecting from the Renaissance to our day, Blom shows a multiplicity of worlds: the scientific cabinets of the 15th century and an Italian scholar employed as dragon slayer; the "Ark" of the Tradescants and a friend's betrayal; Emperor Rudolf II's Prague collection as "practised alchemy"; the macabre art of Dr. Frederik Ruysch, first among embalmers; and the over-flowing menagerie of Sir Hans Sloane's curiosities, later to become the foundation of the British Museum. He also discusses the strange fate of Angelo Soliman, a black man at the Habsburg court who was stuffed and exhibited with wild animals; explores the rise of scientific collecting and classification, and parallel to it, the explosion of collecting as the private passion of hundreds of thousands; and introduces Robert Opie, whose collection of half a million items of household packaging now fills his home in London and two overflowing warehouses in Gloucestershire besides. Out of this glittering diversity of material Blom distils the themes underlying this seemingly elusive pursuit; conquest and possession, and the awareness of our own mortality. The instinct to collect, he says, is rooted in our very being: "Saving the world, or a world, preserving history or genius, saintliness or innocence, touching something beyond our random existence is a labour of love, a constant ritual, one face of the desire to be authentic, to be human".

To Have And To Hold: An Intimate History Of Collectors And Collecting

Allen Lane.

The most breathtaking work of history since Paris 1919. Europe, early in the 20th century: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The hot topics of the day — terrorism and globalization, immigration, consumerism, the lack of moral values, and rivaling superpowers — could make one forget that it is a century ago that this era vanished into the trenches of the Somme and Vimy Ridge. Or did it? The closer one looks, the more this world seems like ours, the more one sees that the questions and realities shaping our lives and thoughts were formulated and laid down at the beginning of the 20th century: feminism, democratization, mass communication, commercial branding, consumerism, state-sponsored genocide, and psychoanalysis were all concepts birthed in this period. This was a time radically unlike the Victorian era that preceded it, a time in which all the old certainties broke down. Philipp Blom succeeds in bringing to life the immediacy of the lives and issues of this fascinating, flawed pre-war period. Through a series of historical vignettes, each chapter focusing on one particularly telling event for every year from 1900 to 1914, The Vertigo Years discovers the great people, powers, and ideas of Europe after 1900. The approach is eclectic, brilliantly combining the novelist’s eye with the craft of the historian. It opens up this era in all its contradictions and similarities to our own. From the Hardcover edition.

The Vertigo Years: Change And Culture In The West, 1900-1914

World

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BLOM, Philipp. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by BLOM, Philipp

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BLOM, Philipp. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

To Have and to Hold : An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting

The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914

A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment

The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914

Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

Wicked Company

Twilight of the Romanovs: A Photographic Odyssey Across Imperial Russia

The Wines of Austria

To Have And To Hold: An Intimate History Of Collectors And Collecting

The Vertigo Years: Change And Culture In The West, 1900-1914