A New York Times Editors' Choice pick Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Food Network, KCRW, WBUR Here & Now,

Louis XIV, regency, rococo, neoclassical, empire, art nouveau, and historicist pastiche: furniture styles march across French history as regimes rise and fall.

Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believ

Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-