Collectors who, like Autolycus the Rogue in The Winter’s Tale, are snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, and whose collections subsequently prove to be of great historic or aesthetic value, or both, excite my admiration for their constructive single-mindedness and foresight. Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933) was one such, David King (1943–2016) another.

Prinzhorn was a German psychiatrist who collected art produced by psychotic patients in mental institutions, little thinking that many of those artist-patients would be killed, as life unworthy of life, only a few years later in a rehearsal of the Holocaust. Much of the work that Prinzhorn collected was not only of psychiatric interest but also of artistic merit, and after years of use by the Nazis for propaganda purposes and then of neglect, it is now properly housed in a Heidelberg museum that produces beautiful monographs on artists such as August Natterer.

King was a British graphic artist who collected 250,000 examples of Soviet graphic art from the time of the Russian Revolution to the Khrushchev era, the largest collection in the world outside Russia, later bought by the Tate in a surprisingly enlightened act of acquisition.

To the names of these two great men in my little personal pantheon must now be added that of a third, Renaud Epstein (b. 1971). Epstein is a French sociologist specializing in urban policy, and he had the brilliant idea (and what is perhaps as important, the determination and assiduity to carry it out) of collecting postcards