What was Gauguin hinting at when he painted Milton's Paradise Lost into a portrait of a friend? How did a chance encounter with Sir John Lavery bring fame to the owner of a small red book? Was it true that no one ever saw Picasso with a book in his hand? And why were the Cumberland girls reading The Fashionable Lover in George Romney's commissioned portrait? Thousands of fine paintings include books in their subject matter. Beginning with the question, "What is a book?", this companionable survey - for art and book lovers alike - explores the symbiotic relationship between the development of books and the emergence of our modern sense of the importance of the individual artist; it parades and interprets the work of many of the greatest artists of the last five hundred years; and it explains how and why books become the single most ubiquitous feature of our cultural lives and, in large measure, of our everyday existence.