For the person who has everything…

“THE Art of Contentment” was a devotional work sold in Britain in the 1840s as part of a series known as The Englishman’s Library. Christian industrialists, the backbone of the newly wealthy Victorians, would ask their booksellers to provide the whole set of 31 volumes for the libraries of the grand houses they were building, both in London and the countryside. Now an old London bibliopole is taking a leaf out of their book.

Heywood Hill has been selling books in Mayfair since 1936, when its catalogue included the first British edition of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Nancy Mitford earned £3 a week working there during the second world war, selling books to lettered types such as Osbert Sitwell and Cyril Connolly. Her style and wit helped establish Heywood Hill as a centre of social and literary life in the 1940s. John le Carré used its book-lined walls for a scene in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”.

Heywood Hill’s boxes of books, with their blue-and-white address labels, still offer year-round bounty to customers all over the world, but competition from Amazon, an online bookseller, has forced the fashionable bouquiniste to reinvent itself. Under its new owner, Mitford’s nephew the Duke of Devonshire, it has quietly become a leading purveyor of bespoke libraries.

The first major commission, in 2013, was a collection of books on 20th-century Modernist art and design for a chalet in Switzerland. The 3,000-volume library took four months to put together and three days to install at a cost of just under £500,000 ($788,000).

A Saudi businesswoman wanted her London boardroom lined with books about the West’s engagement with Islam and the Arab world. The thousand-or-so books—a reader’s selection rather than a true collector’s library—cost £80,000. In early December a hundred boxes of books on the art of the American west coast and on the great American novel were packed up for a client in southern California. Next, Nicky Dunne, who runs Heywood Hill, is squeezing books on current affairs into brown suede attaché cases for a suite of 30 private jets.

Book-lovers who are less well-heeled could try one of Mr Dunne’s various subscription offers, such as the Anglophile (£950 for four boxes of hardbacks throughout the year) or the Expat (£500 for the same in paperbacks). Potential new customers are writing in every week, he says. Bespoke libraries now account for nearly half his turnover. Who says book-selling has no future?