Tales of crazed connoisseurs and eccentric aficionados fill Maurice Rheims’s book, The Strange Life of Objects

Whether roaming among Pompeian paintings or bourgeois boudoirs, few books on interiors have ever been as broad in their erudition as Mario Praz’s An Illustrated History of Furnishing

Elsie de Wolfe, a former stage actor, became one of the most celebrated decorators of the early 20th century, inspiring a whole generation of American housewives

Dorothy Draper, the swaggering lover of gregarious plasterwork and broad stripes, talks a lot of sense in her practical 1939 guide Decorating is Fun!

Mitchell Owens savours Diary of an Art Dealer, René Gimpel’s compelling – and often caustic – chronicle of life in interwar Paris