This book began as a study of the bibelot, the modern French term for knick-knack or curiosity, but quickly grew to encompass the larger questions of collecting, consuming, classifying, and describing. For the sake of working within a coherent historical context, the primary locus of the book remains nineteenth-century France, though analogous cultural phenomena can be found throughout Europe, North America, and many former European colonies. Because the topic does transcend national borders, I do include several critical texts from outside France.

Bibelots – knick-knacks, curiosities, collectibles, antiques, objets d'art – proliferate in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The bibelot makes its first major canonical appearance in Balzac's Le Cousin Pons (1847). Its golden age is marked by Huysmans's A rebours, Edmond de Goncourt's La Maison d'un artiste, and Mallarmé's famous line “Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore” (1881, 1884, and 1887 respectively). By this point in literary prose, one more intellectual than chronological, material objects have ceased to function as mere vehicles of information about their user and the world of people, as authors begin to provide more and more information about objects themselves, and the world of objects to which these belong. Plot begins to deteriorate, overrun by description. Signifiers multiply then begin to float free. By the end of the century, the presence of objects in texts no longer needs to be justified by their connections either to people or to the “real.”