Collectors are the physiognomists of the world of objects [and in this they] turn into interpreters of fate. One has only to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired.... To renew the old world—that is the collector's deepest desire when he is driven to acquire.

— Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," in Illuminations, 1955