About a third of the way through her essay ‘Three Sisters’, Janet Malcolm describes the mysterious allure of bookshops and declares, ‘the association of books with humanistic ideals is deeply entrenched in the public imagination and finds its way into the rueful articles that regularly appear throughout the world, whose own subliminal message is that books are a kind of last bastion against barbarity’. She’s writing here about a bookshop in New York run by a trio of sisters engaged in the funny business of selling antiquarian literature. It’s a safe enough proposition to say Malcolm knows a lot about books: by way of being one of the most celebrated critics and essayists in America.

Sometimes she quite literally tears them into pieces—she’s a collagist, not only in the way she dissects and reassembles her subjects into coolly stylish sentences (likely to fill her subjects with fear) but in the cutting-and-pasting sense. A few years ago, she exhibited a series of collages she’d made with pages from a book on astronomy and another of Emily Dickinson’s diaries from the winter years of the lonely poet’s life. One of these later fragments (though it was not one used by Malcolm) is a scrap of envelope with the first dashed-off draft of what would become the famous line, ‘There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away’. Malcolm, who is 85 now, would know this better than just about anyone.