A short walk from Bumpus and Mudie's, these bookstalls in Farringdon Road existed until very recently. Judging from the clothes the photograph was taken in the early 1900s.

The Last Minute 1934, a poster by Vanessa Bell, commissioned by the Post Office but never used (why?!).

Vita Sackville-West study cum library at Sissinghurst.

An 1859 advertisement for another Oxford Street shop, this time the famous Mudie's library.

From women reading books to women going to bookshops. This is a painting of Bumpus in Oxford Street (perhaps a Christmas card?), undated, but probably 1930s. The shop was west of Oxford Circus station, on the north side of the road.

And finally The Railway 1873, in which one of Manet's favourite models is sitting with a book on her lap near the railway track, beside the daughter of one of Manet's Parisian neighbours. It would be difficult to write a short story about these two (they are so detached from one another) but a whole book could be written about the painting itself. It's in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Another Wife of the Artist, this time the altogether more serene Elizabeth Macke, painted in fauvist style by the German painter August Macke only two years before he was killed in France, in September 1914 when he was 27. Staatliches Museum Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie Berlin.

It's odd that this was painted only forty years after the previous portrait - Susan Eakins looks so modern in her pose and her expression, and her life would make a whole novel not just a short story: she had been a superb painter, but gave up after her marriage, unlike Christina Robertson yesterday. And it's annoying that the title is The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog (c.1884-9 by Thomas Eakins, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York page 148 of Forbidden Fruit) rather than simply Portrait of Susan Eakins. But her husband was 'one of America's few indisputably great painters' and that is how 'great men' saw their wives - as theirs.

Portrait of Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna c. 1849 State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, painted by Christina Robertson (1796-1854), a Scottish portrait painter who lived and worked in Russia for the last years of her life. The duchess 'devoted her entire life to the education of women and other charitable concerns. She set up public schools for girls from all social backgrounds...' (p120 Forbidden Fruit).

We sell (and continually reorder) a book in the Lamb's Conduit Street shop called Forbidden Fruit: A History of Women and Books in Art by Christiane Inmann, published by Prestel at an amazingly good value £19.99. Every day this week we are going to put up a painting of a woman reading taken from the book. Here is the cover, and page 170: The House Maid 1910 by the American painter William McGregor Paxton which is in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. (Don't forget that we can send any book, not just our own, for the usual rate of £2 in the UK, £4 to Europe and £6 airmail - £4 surface - to anywhere else.)

And the dining room table to end all dining room tables: Virginia Woolf's at Monk's House, Rodmell. Presumably Vanessa Bell painted this for her sister.

Maybe we stopped using carpets as tablecloths because they are impossible to shake. This is Interior at L'Etang-la Ville 1893 by Vuillard; but it could just as well be called Shaking the Tablecloth. You have to look at it for a while to work out what's happening, then it becomes clear: French bread is so crumby...

Covering a table with a carpet is a rather covetable look. This is Pieter de Hooch 1664 Woman Reading a Letter, Szepmureszeti Museum, Budapest.

Setting the Table by Stevan Dohanos 1957. Question: are they being taught in order to get a job in the catering industry or to catch a husband? It's probably ten years too early for the former. Even nowadays the issue of laying the table raises one's feminist hackles; yesterday's Larsson table had to be meticulously laid by someone.

A celebration this week of – tables: because we have had a new look at Lamb's Conduit Street, and a tidy-up, and instead of too many tottering walls of boxes now have three rather elegant tables piled with books. It meant that the book group last week could sit round two tables pushed together rather than in an ungainly circle. And the lunch on the Thursday of next week (at which a few places are still available to hear the bestselling contemporary novelist Elizabeth Buchan in discussion with the historical novelist Vanessa Hannam) will also be round tables rather than on rows of folding chairs. Carl Larsson painted Around the Lamp at Evening in 1900.

A tile from the newly restored Leighton House Museum, not far from our Notting Hill shop. The house was the former home and studio of the artist, Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) and if you can't make it to see the actual museum, here is a virtual tour.

The gret hall at the Art Worker's Guild on Queen's Square, founded in 1884 as an alternative to the more hierarchical Royal Academy and in which Walter Crane in particular was an important figure. The annual Persephone Lecture is held here: this year's speaker will be the historian David Kynaston on November 24th.

Another May Day: this is by another illustrator of children's literature, Kate Greenaway (1846-1901). Several American universities have digitised their archives of nineteenth century children's books; the best one is at the Baldwin Library.

Walter Crane (1845-1914) was one of the most important illustrators of children's nursery literature in the Arts and Crafts movement. He drew this allegorical female figure for The Clarion magazine to call attention to, amongst other things, the terrible working conditions of children in the fields and factories of Victorian Britain.