Three years ago, visitors clamoured to gain entry to the Royal Academy’s Van Gogh exhibition, eager to see the artist’s personal letters and sketches usually held at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Now the Dutch museum is presenting a facsimile of four sketchbooks that Van Gogh used during the five and a half years before his death in 1890. With rarely displayed drawings (such as Coupledancing, December 1885, second picture), sketches and poems, including two pencil sketches of his renowned Sunflowers canvas, each set of 290 pages will be available for £445 (first picture), in a limited edition of 1,000.

Masterminded in collaboration with the Folio Society, the facsimiles will be woven together in exact reproduction of the intact originals and will be on sale from May 1 to coincide with Van Gogh at Work – an exhibition that marks the museum’s reopening and 160th anniversary of Van Gogh’s birth. Smudged black chalk portraits lie alongside colourful landscapes of Van Gogh’s post-impressionistic world; scrawled train timetables and prescriptions fill the weathered pages in between. The tomes vary in size, from around 10cm x 7cm to 10cm x 20cm, with many torn pages reproduced by hand.

“The sketchbooks give an impression of Van Gogh’s studio practice,” says the museum’s head of collections, Marije Vellekoop, whose commentary about the four volumes is housed within each set’s display box, “and the scribbles and notes reflect his preoccupations.” Which, even in the case of the 19th-century maestro, still includes remembering which train to catch.