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A collectorn and a hoard differ not by volume but by how objects are ordered.

Brain science confirms the distinction.

In-betweens are not hoarders or collectors.

In 2009, an art installation called Waste Not traveled from Beijing to New York, London, Vancouver, and Sydney. It consisted of ordinary household objects, bottle caps, toothpaste tubes, shoes, and kitchen utensils, all saved over decades by Zhao Xiangyuan, the mother of artist Song Dong. Her son had worried for years that her overstuffed Beijing house was harming her health. Rather than purging her possessions, he sat with her and sorted every item, laying them out in rows grouped by size, color, and use. Not one thing was thrown away. In doing this, something remarkable happened. What had looked like a hoard became a collection, at least in the eyes of museum visitors.

That transformation sits at the heart of a thought-provoking article by anthropologist Katie Kilroy-Marac of the University of Toronto, published in the Journal of Material Culture. Her central question is one I have been curious about throughout my professional life as a collector of Chinese export porcelain. What, exactly, is the difference between a collection and a hoard? And, is there an in-between?

Kilroy-Marac suggests it is not quantity that separates a collector from a hoarder

Most people assume the difference is volume. The hoarder has too much. The DSM-5, the diagnostic manual psychiatrists use, says otherwise. In its Diagnostic Features section for Hoarding Disorder, the manual acknowledges that, in some cases of collecting, the number of possessions may be similar to that accumulated by a person with........

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