Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding By Rebecca R. Falkoff Cornell University Press. 2021. £14.99 (pb). 270 pp. ISBN 9781501752803

This is a masterly and authoritative exposition of the social history and popular culture of hoarding behaviour. Falkoff has personal investment in the subject matter, as both her paternal grandmother and father are hoarders. When her grandmother, Fontaine, died, there was need to lease a 40-yard garbage lorry to clear out the detritus of her life. The family found ‘a rattlesnake's rattle and 17th century ecclesiastical books; stacks indiscriminate with junk mail and stock certificates; decomposing vermin and rotting food buried under creaky antiques’.

The opening chapter introduces the Collyers, brothers Langley and Homer, who lived on Fifth Avenue, New York. On their death in 1947, 140 tons of combustible material had to be removed from their mansion, including 14 pianos, rugs, furniture, clocks, toys, musical instruments, pictures, linen and clothing. Their story has inspired several accounts, including E. L. Doctorow's Homer and Langley. The Collyers showed what will be recognised by psychiatrists as Diogenes syndrome and described in DSM-5 as hoarding disorder. What Falkoff does, and does superbly well, is to widen the ambit of hoarding to include not merely the recognisable behaviour, but also the relationships of hoarding to the extraordinary personal collection of books (bibliomania), the rise of flea markets and the use of the symbolism of hoarding in, for example, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. She also deals with the centrality of notions of waste in modern society and the natural response to conserve and to collect. Here, Falkoff identifies newspapers as objects that are ubiquitous in hoards and psychiatrists who have seen cases will testify to this too. The paradox is that newspapers are true examples of ephemera. They have negligible exchange value despite being material objects with text and are easily discarded yet they feature in hoards.

I had not fully grasped the relationship between hoarding behaviour and the collection of books. I suppose because I had associated hoarding with the collection of useless objects that are often dirty if not decomposing organic matter. But the example of Antoine-Marie-Henri Boulard, who collected 600 000 volumes in his six-storey Paris home, and for whom collecting became a daily habit of wandering to bookstalls and stores and never returning without buying a book, opened my eyes. His collection of books became indistinguishable from one another and were piled in precarious towers like building blocks.

Falkoff appeals to Freud and psychoanalysis, to Foucault and Derrida, but ignores the role of organic brain disease in causation. So, there is no mention of the role of behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, or of how decline in self-care and self-awareness are mediated by impairments of frontal activity nor of the place of impairment of disgust recognition and processing in hoarding behaviour. Nonetheless, this is a major scholarly achievement that deals with an important subject in a thoughtful and thorough manner.