To mark the fortieth birthday of the London Review of Books, we scoured our archives, personal collections and forgotten filing cabinets to bring you the best of the paper’s history. This selection of letters, drawings, postcards, field notes and typescripts, from contributors including Alan Bennett, Angela Carter, Oliver Sacks, Edward Said, Richard Rorty and Jenny Diski – plus the occasional prime minister and Nobel prize-winner – are accompanied by stories from LRB writers and editors, as well as introductory essays by Mary-Kay Wilmers and Andrew O’Hagan. The result is an intimate account of four decades of intellectual life and a testament to the power of print – and well-edited sentences – in the new information age.