Why do some people keep everything from ice-cream lids to sugar faces of the dead, asks Rosita Boland

It was the Victorians who first tackled the phenomenon of collecting. Natural history was the communal popular culture occupation of the era. People collected butterflies, moths, bird's eggs, fossils, leaves, shells, and flowers that they then pressed and made into pictures. Big game hunters in the colonies bagged tigers, elephants, lions. Heads, tusks and skins were all brought home and displayed as trophies. It was the heyday of the Grand Tour, when the wealthy travelled afar and brought home esoteric souvenirs that they were anxious to display and impress their visitors with.

Thus came about a new item of furniture - the cabinet of curiosities. Usually freestanding, these specially built cabinets were glass-fronted, with several shelves and compartments where objects were placed in an order that best pleased their owner. They were like miniature museums, reflecting their owners' eclectic interests and travels.

In the 21st century, we collect more objects than ever, but in the era of cheap flights, displaying souvenirs from other countries is taken for granted.

Mass production has meant that we now also have far more possessions in general than our counterparts a century ago had. Clothes, handbags, shoes, books, electrical goods, toys, cars - our lives and houses are stuffed with stuff. As a result, collections have diversified and specialised hugely, both by amateur and professional collectors.

Some people focus on one item, such as teapots, snuff boxes, stamps or coins. Others focus on a particular era, such as Art Deco. Antiques and fine art are perennially popular.

IN RECENT YEARS, there has also been a new phenomenon of abstract collections: the many books of lists and miscellany.

Schott's Original Miscellany, published in 2003, was a clever collection of such diverse information as how to tie a bow-tie, a list of Cockney rhyming slang, and the manner of deaths of Burmese kings - several of whom were killed by their elephants.

Charles McGrath, writing in the New York Times, speculated on what a diagram of Ben Schott's mind would resemble: "A photograph of what the British call a box room: a storage area for stuff no one knows what to do with. A spectacularly cluttered box room, in this case, jammed with cartons and filing cabinets randomly stuffed with sublimely useless objects."

Schott's Original Miscellany was indeed the original and best of the species. Scores of other compilation books continue to come scampering after it. 1000 Places to See Before You Die; 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die; 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die; 101 Things to Do Before You Die. The rather histrionic titles at least serve the purpose of focusing the mind on the brevity of life.

The Victorians put their curiosities in cabinets: we increasingly put ours in books.

One recent publication even calls itself such - Brewer's Cabinet of Curiosities. "Scholarly squirelling" as the preface explains. Within are sections offering such oddities as: curious book titles involving food (How to Cook Roadkill); philanthropic societies of 18th-century England - the Forlorn Female's Fund of Mercy; and diplomatic blunders - "I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism and anti-racism," as declared by George Bush Senior, campaigning for the presidency in 1988.

In Flagrante Collecto (caught in the act of collecting) is the title of a book by Marilynn Gelfman Karp, which records in words and pictures the results of her lifetime's habit of collecting.

A professor of art at New York University, her collections have been exhibited several times.

KARP'S COLLECTION encompasses such abstract things as "mental collections" - repeating motifs you notice over time and begin looking out for, such as small objects that have become set into tarmac in heat, and footprints, leaves and bird-tracks imprinted onto once-wet cement.

Karp must have a very large house. Her collections include toy robots, ashtrays, washboards, clothes pegs, crutches, shoe-horns, decals, badges, sugar sachets, playing cards, door-knockers, architectural ornaments, truck reflectors, buttons, marbles and air-sickness bags.

She is particularly interested in objects that were intended to be disposable, such as the lids of ice-cream cartons, mosquito coils, novelty soaps, novelty candles and the decorated sugar skulls made in Mexico to commemorate the souls of the dead.

Social history or useless rubbish? It depends on what you value or find interesting, thus proving true the old cliche: one man's junk is another man's treasure.

• In Flagrante Collecto (caught in the act of collecting) by Marilynn Glefman Karp is published by Abrams, £34.95 in UK