Abstract
This article considers Goethe as both practitioner and theorist of the art of collecting. Drawing on biographical, historical, critical, and fictional sources, it explores how acquiring objects establishes a nexus of telling relationships among the object, the collector, the collection, other observers (real or fictitious), and between all of these and the external world. Producing at once a body of knowledge and a source of aesthetic contemplation, collecting figures prominently in Goethe’s epistolary novella, Der Sammler und die Seinigen (1799), a rich exposition of collecting practices and their multiple meanings, and a text which can be seen obliquely to illuminate many of its author’s later writings.
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