For his bookshop installation, One Grand, the editor Aaron Hicklin asked people to name the 10 books they’d take with them if they were marooned on a desert island. The next in the series is the British vacuum-cleaner entrepreneur Sir James Dyson. He shares his list exclusively with T.

“Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit,” Mort Rosenblum

Rosenblum is a fearless Associated Press reporter who loves olive trees. He then wrote a book on the global production of olive oil that I couldn’t put down. We arranged to meet when we discovered that we each lived and grew olive trees very close to each other in the Var in Provence. It’s not every day one gets to meet an author he admires.

“The Story of Design,” Charlotte and Peter Fiell

Design historians Charlotte and Peter Fiell take a journey through the earliest forms of design. Through dynamic illustrations, this history of design stretches over the centuries.

“English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980,” Martin Wiener

It took an American academic to research and diagnose this British class snobbishness about the activity of manufacturing. Astonishingly, it is more acceptable for the educated classes to go into banking or insurance rather than dirty their hands making things.