We are hunter-gatherers with a capacity for amazement, wired to search for an organizing principle by which to contain the chaos of reality. We organize what we find into categories and hierarchies, hovering over which is one of the strangest things about being human: preference. How odd to have a strong feeling about a color or an object or a sequence of chords. And yet our preferences are how we sculpt the self from the monolith of the species.

Preference taken to its highest form touches amazement — the glad disbelief that something so personally relevant and rapturous could exist amid the impersonal allness of all there is. One of the most moving things about us, and one of the most felicitous things about being alive together, is that we get to share our amazements. A collection — be it of rocks or vinyl records or facts about the Moon — is a constellation of amazements in the sky of one mind that can light up another with its loveliness, its strangeness, its sheer delight.

Once, visiting Maurice Sendak’s farmhouse, I was struck by the ample shelves and antique medicine cabinets lined with Mickey Mouse figurines of every possible variety. I don’t have a strong feeling about Mickey Mouse, but Sendak’s tender and meticulous preference gave me inordinate delight. After all, if to love is to cherish the particular in a person, then to collect particulars is a practice of loving the world.

That is what Bethan Woollvin celebrates in the brightly delightful These Are My Rocks: A Story About Collecting (public library).

Page by page, collection by collection — rocks, pointy things, broken things, invisible things, banana jokes — the essence of collecting, this strange impulse humans share with almost no other animal (except perhaps the bowerbird), is revealed: to find things and “be amazed by what you find.”

For a perfect counterpart, complement These Are My Rocks with Finnish author and artist Maija Hurme’s Odds and Ends — an illustrated love letter to the opposite of collecting: the loveliness of letting things go.