In this wry account, Billy Baldwin Remembers (1974), a few ghastly clients receive some overdue payback. Mitchell Owens is all ears

With its high count of waspish decorating put-downs, Michael Greer's Inside Design (1962) has Mitchel Owens ducking the zingers

When Slim Aarons was done with war photography, he was quick to reinvent himself, finding a rich seam to mine – a Croesus-rich seam – in the manicured gardens of moneyed families. His 1974 book, A Wonderful Time, shows the snapper at his best and all those socialites and lounger lizards at their most carefree

It’s well worth outsourcing your outbuilding design to the masters of the past; Peter Joel Harrison’s pattern book-style Garden Houses and Privies is one such masterpiece. This compendium of pre-eminent American privies – with a dash of imagination – offers a shedload of models for modern projects, from garden offices to art studios

Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language analyses everything from downtowns to doorknobs, itemising 253 building blocks to make communities more livable. Easy on the eye it isn’t, says Mitchell Owens, but the book’s aims are avowedly utopian

In the early 20th century, Margherita Arlina Hamm entered the homes of Broadway and West End stars to report back to her curious readers the thespians’ choice of wallpaper and curtains. Her hot take, Mitchell Owens argues, was far distinguished from celebrity journalism de nos jours

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