The best books for Christmas

Boyd Tonkin introduces our experts' guide to seasonal treats in print

My book of the year is also a sign of the times. If you have £325 to spend before 31 December (when the price rises to £395), blow it on Thames & Hudson's massively illustrated six-volume cased edition of the complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh. You will never find a more beautiful, scholarly or satisfying showpiece for all the arts of print.

If, however, you have nothing to spend, go to www.vangoghletters.org. There you may access the edition for free. The generous resources of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam have given an extra lease of digital life to the ultimate in high-end book-making. Look out, in future, for other such partnerships between a smaller, pricier boutique style of quality publishing and wider online distribution.

This revolution remains in its embryonic stages. Google's rights grabs, Amazon's war on high-street bookselling (with the Borders chain an Advent casualty), the snail-like progress of e-readers into consumers' hearts and purses: all advanced in 2009, while leaving the old panto punch-ups of British publishing (celebs vs literati, indies vs conglomerates, hype vs talent) still happily in place.

Out of these quarrels innumerable good, and a few great, books annually emerge. In this section we celebrate many of them across the gamut of genres: fiction and food, poetry and showbiz, nature and biography, history and sport, art and memoir... Enjoy this abundance – and, above all, buy some of it – while you still have the chance.

Click here or on the links on the right to launch our guide