“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the

So Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in October 1876, charting the latest instalment of the Holbein cult. He was renting a room in Isleworth, west London, still hoping for a religious career

Rufus Bird on catching the eye of a buyer in the social media era

“This tremendous aggregate of a book has many of the characteristics of a Festschrift assembled to honour some Great Influencer”: so, in 1973, the architectural historian Priscilla Metcalf began the f

It’s a sunny summer afternoon in a verdant corner of the Essex countryside. A pretty pastoral landscape lies before us, with cattle sheltering in the shade of oak trees, rolling green fields, and a gr

Exhibition of the week Lucian Freud: Drawing into ...