Walter Benjamin once said, “The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.”
Like a child, the collector absorbed by his collection “dreams his way not only into a remote or bygone world, but at the same time into a better one.” An object in a collection is mana-laden. Its mysterious charisma exists, however, only when it is part of a collection or potentially part of a collection. The collection constitutes the magic circle which imbues the object with its wizard aura. This means that an object, no matter how individually important, can never be as significant to a collector as one, no matter how individually unimportant, which takes its magic place inside the circle.
Extracto de um excelente texto de Kim A. Herzinger sobre o que é um coleccionador (e uma colecção).