"For a collector […] ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.”

BENJAMIN, Walter, Unpacking my Library : A Talk about Book Collecting, in Illuminations, New York : Schocken, 1969.