Though I have recently warmed once again to my Kindle – as a means to avoid a frightful lug of holiday reading matter – the feel of a proper book in my hands remains for me a pleasure of leisure significantly superior.

Few books are more proper, by which I mean more perfectly produced; few more beautiful – in short, few more of a joy to read than the splendid products of The Folio Society.

This year sees the 70th anniversary of this admirable institution whose founder, Charles Ede, laid down guiding principles for its operations that are followed to this day.

Its stated aim was “to produce editions of the world’s great literature in a format worthy of its content, at a price within the reach of everyman”.

The Society’s anniversary is being marked in suitable style with a free exhibition, The Artful Book, at London’s V&A, which began this month and continues until January 28.

Pride of place goes to the Society’s very first production, an edition of Tales by Tolstoy, in the classic translation by Constance Garnett with illustrations by Elizabeth Macfadyen.

Other artists whose work features in the show include Quentin Blake, Angela Barrett, Charles Keeping, Neil Packer and Harry Brockway.

It is revealing, perhaps, of just how many lovely books the Society has produced that none of the volumes on display overlaps with any of the books in my own collection of its titles.

I possess some 200 or so, ranged prettily along four shelves in my sitting room, admirably illustrating Anthony Powell’s contention – spelt out in the title of one of the novels in his Dance to the Music of Time sequence – that “books do furnish a room”. (Powell’s masterpiece, though it was issued by the Society a decade ago, is not among them.)

The pride of my collection are the superb leather-bound editions of the works of Wordsworth, Keats and Coleridge. My boxed sets include five volumes of Rudyard Kipling’s stories, Gibbons’s Decline and Fall in its entirety – I confess I have yet to plough through it all, though I enjoy an occasional dip – all of Jane Austen’s novels and a choice selection of the detective stories of Dorothy L Sayers, the reading of which at last cured me – only recently – of my aversion to her snooty sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey.

My most returned-to books over the years ave been concerned with travels through parts of Britain. These include HV Morton’s In Search of England, Byng’s Rides around Britain, Betjeman’s Britain, Francis Frith’s Travels of a Victorian Photographer, and – my favourite of all – Daniel Defoe’s A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain.

To this collection has recently been added another classic of the genre, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, though of course this belongs as much to the category of humour as travel.

The book has been reissued, priced at £34.95, in the format first offered by the Society in 1992, handsomely bound in cloth and blocked with a design by artist Paul Cox who also contributes 71 superb colour illustrations. As with all Folio Society books it of course comes in a slip case. It is exclusively available at foliosociety.com.

This was the one book that, despite its weight, did take its place in my suitcase when I packed for a recent holiday holiday. Perusal in the Greek sunshine provided delicious home thoughts from abroad.

Despite Jerome’s occasional tendency to drag out a joke too long, and some eyebrow-raising patches of ‘fine writing’ – chiefly on the subject of nature – the book remains a joy.

I revelled particularly in his depiction of the fourth occupant of the skiff, the delightful dog Montmorency, showing how well the author understood the canine mind, that of the fox terrier especially.

Rereading the book reminded me how we Oxonians have much cause for pride in an author we often overlook as being – in terms of his place of his country residence – a local one.

His final resting place is in the churchyard in Ewelme, close to the scene of some of the adventures in his most famous book.