If you think about coffee table books as beautiful reference material, you immediately get the two most important requirements of a good one: It must be visually stunning and immensely informative about its subject. These qualities are also what makes them such a perfect and valued Christmas gift idea. They allow the receiver to become even more expert at a chosen hobby or interest and, when they’re not enjoying it themselves, leave it out as tabletop decor that doubles as a way to showcase and share their love with visitors.
We’ve gathered the best coffee table books on the market right now spanning a large range of categories — including home design, fashion, food, travel, pop culture, sports, music, history, and more. You could get through your whole list with this round-up alone! As a treat for being such a thoughtful and efficient shopper, pick up one or two of these gorgeous tomes for yourself — believe us, you will find a bunch you would be overjoyed to find under the tree.
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1
best for history buffs
Wolfgang Wild and Jordan Lloyd
‘History as They Saw It: Iconic Moments from the Past in Color’
2
best hostess gift
Tia Keenan and Noah Fecks
‘The Art of the Cheese Plate: Pairings, Recipes, Style, Attitude’
3
best for art lovers
Andre Saraiva
‘André Saraiva: Graffiti Life’
4
best for your travel buddy
Lonely Planet
The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World
5
best for royals followers
Robin Muir and Josephine Ross
The Crown in Vogue
6
best for soccer fanatics
Robin Muir and Josephine Ross
Men In Blazers Present Gods of Soccer: The Pantheon of the 100 Greatest Soccer Players (According to Us)
7
best for all the women in your life
Ashley Longshore and Diane von Fürstenberg
‘Roar!: A Collection of Mighty Women’
8
best for home design buffs
Architectural Digest
Architectural Digest at 100: A Century of Style
9
best for dog lovers
Traer Scott
Finding Home: Shelter Dogs and Their Stories
10
best for outdoor adventurers
Christopher Cauble
Yellowstone: A Land of Wild and Wonder
11
best for your bestie with wanderlust
Gray Malin
Gray Malin: The Essential Collection
12
best for cat owners
Rojiman & Umatan
Cat-Hair Hats For Cats: Craft Fetching Headwear For Your Feline Friends
13
best for your favorite scrapbooker or vision boarder
Maria Rivans
Extraordinary Things to Cut Out and Collage
14
best for vinyl devotees
Michael Ochs
1000 Record Covers
15
best for photography enthusiasts
Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz: Wonderland
16
best for anyone into coastal chic style
Nina Freudenberger, Heather Summerville, and Brittany Ambridge
Surf Shack: Laid-Back Living by the Water
17
best for LEGO lovers
Brian Lyles and Jason Lyles
The LEGO Neighborhood Book: Build Your Own LEGO Town!
18
best for the family’s head chef
Joanna Gaines
Magnolia Table
19
best for would-be world travelers
National Geographic
Destinations of a Lifetime: 225 of the World’s Most Amazing Places
20
best for car nuts
DK
‘Classic Car: The Definitive Visual History’
21
best for Old School Hollywood admirers
Oscar Abolafia
Icons
22
best for budding home chefs
Alison Roman
Dining In
23
best for… anyone!
Bruce Velick
Joy!: Photographs of Life’s Happiest Moments
24
best for design gurus
Gloria Koenig
Eames
25
best for sneakerheads
Simon Wood
Sneaker Freaker. The Ultimate Sneaker Book
26
best for creative types
Leatrice Eiseman and Keith Recker
Pantone: The 20th Century in Color
27
best for the loved one all about mindfulness
John Burns
Kinfolk Travel
28
best for animal lovers
Tim Flach and Richard O. Prum
Birds
29
best for New York-ophiles
Assouline
‘New York By New York’
30
best for the person who thinks organizing is fun
Shira Gill
Minimalista
31
best for quote enthusiasts
Christina Scotch
I Feel That
32
best for Star Wars superfans
Paul Duncan
‘The Star Wars Archives’
33
best for coffee connoisseurs
James Hoffmann
The World Atlas of Coffee: From Beans to Brewing — Coffees Explored, Explained and Enjoyed
34
best for your fanciest friends and family
Assouline
Hamptons Private
35
best for classic film buffs
Taschen
Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs
36
best for beer aficianados
Tim Webb and Stephen Beaumont
World Atlas of Beer: The Essential Guide to the Beers of the World
37
best for the beauty mavens on your list
Tracey Cunningham
True Color: The Essential Hair Color Handbook
38
best for admirers of tattoo art
Frederic Claquin
1000 Tattoos: The Most Creative New Designs from the World’s Leading and Up-And-Coming Tattoo Artists
39
best for astrology followers
Louise Edington
The Complete Guide to Astrology: Understanding Yourself, Your Signs, and Your Birth Chart
40
best for art lovers
Taschen
Andy Warhol. Polaroids 1958-1987
41
best for baseball fans
Graphic Image
Ballparks, Past and Present
Ysolt Usigan Ysolt Usigan is a lifestyle writer and editor with 15+ years of experience working in digital media.
In the huddle of Greek islands known as the Argo-Saronic Gulf, sun-soaked Hydra has long been a place where creative minds have gathered. Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Leonard Cohen were all captivated by the salt-white houses and the sense of total disconnection (the island was without phone lines until the mid-1960s and remains car-free to this day).
More recently, the island formed the backdrop for a project by photographer Annemarieke van Drimmelen and her partner, the painter Jasper Krabbé, which is the subject of a new book, June, with an exhibition scheduled for later this year. Named after their three-year-old daughter, the photographs record the mundane objects and scenes that caught her attention on family outings around the island and elsewhere. The images have then been overlaid with strokes of paint and snippets of poems to create a series of hybrid, collaged artworks that seek to show Hydra through a child’s gaze. “Her view was so optimistic, beautiful and innocent,” says van Drimmelen. “She can see a whole paradise in a galloping horse or a piece of string.” AH June by Annemarieke van Drimmelen and Jasper Krabbé is published by Libraryman in an edition of 500 copies. In October, it will go on show at the new Institute Huis Vasari, Amsterdam
In a surreal sequence in Federico Fellini’s The Temptation of Dr Antonio, a sequin-clad Anita Ekberg steps out of an advertising billboard and proceeds to bait the prudish Dr Antonio with an array of tantalising delights, chief among them a fridge full of ice-cold drinks. According to the critic Gianni Canova, Ekberg’s seduction could be taken for a burlesque of an advert by Campari, which has often used sensuality to sell.
His new illustrated history, Campari and Cinema, looks at how film has been inspired by the carmine spirit, and vice versa. Examples from Campari’s long history of image-making run from its 1901 poster depicting a couple kissing under a crimson light to the 1926 poster showing a bottle protruding from a drinks table, “almost reproducing the motion of a film camera”, to Paolo Sorrentino’s provocative, noirish 2017 campaign film Killer Red, which opens with a red-nailed hand holding the stem of a curvaceous cocktail glass. Using these, plus close readings of films – including the on-screen depiction of pleasure in When Harry Met Sally – Canova analyses the invention and artistry behind one of the world’s most loved aperitifs. BS Campari and the Cinema, edited with a text by Gianni Canova, is published by SKIRA, €50
“Just as there are key moments in the family album, constituted by ceremonies, there are also less intense moments of everyday life,” wrote the artist Luigi Ghirri in 1991, “which are still depicted there because they document the unfolding of an existence.”
This chronicling of both the mundane and the ceremonial defines Puglia, a photographic account of Ghirri’s relationship with the southern Italian region, featuring many previously unseen images. He captures the spectrum of life there, from a pile of bitter puntarelle sprouts drying in the sun to a young girl dressed in her frothy white confirmation gown on her way to the church. It’s all, as the subtitle tells us, tra albe e tramonti (“between sunrises and sunsets”). BS Puglia: Tra Albe e Tramonti by Luigi Ghirri is published by Mack, £45
Traditionally the subject of still-life paintings, the flower has a rich history in art photography too, from Fox Talbot’s ghostly floral photograms of the 1830s to Lee Friedlander’s thorny monochrome stalks of the 1990s. A new book, the second instalment of a series started in 1991, surveys contemporary contributions to the genre.
This edition includes Robert Mapplethorpe’s suggestive stems of the 1980s, Maisie Cousins’ super-enlarged studies of a slimy, decaying bouquet, and Pedro Almodóvar’s characteristically chromatic still-lifes, which juxtapose wilting flowers against sleek jewel-toned vases – a further example of the filmmaker’s fascination with ageing. As Danaé Panchaud writes in her essay, this compendium shows that “the alleged fixed symbolic meanings of flowers, peddled by keen Victorian marketers and based on a very narrow range of examples, are consistently being disproved by new, and often unexpected, allegories and symbols”. BS Flora Photographica: Masterworks of Contemporary Flower Photography by William A Ewing and Danaé Panchaud is published by Thames & Hudson, £45
Ever since the Belle Epoque, when new train lines opened up the south of France, the Cote d’Azur has attracted photographers and artists with its sapphire waters and near-tropical light.
Here, curator Sophie Wright and photography expert Geneviève Janvrin chart the photographic history of the Riviera – from Robert Capa’s shots of a holidaying Picasso to Lee Miller’s sultry summer in Cannes. Wright approvingly quotes Matisse, who said of his own time there that “everything was fake, absurd, amazing, delicious”. BAS Light on the Riviera: Photography of the Cote d’Azur by Sophie Wright and Geneviève Janvrin is published by teNeues, £50
Mallakhamb – translated from the Sanskrit for “wrestler pole” – is known as the mother sport of ancient India, dating back to the 12th century: it was used by warriors and wrestlers to train in the absence of an opponent. The gravity-defying art combines yoga poses and wrestling grips with the athleticism of gymnastics, the fluid sequences producing a form of aerial acrobatics.
Under British rule, Mallakhamb’s popularity dwindled – but in recent years it has undergone a revival, and it is now recognised as one of the fastest growing sports in the world.
In his new book, London-based photographer and regular HTSI contributor Vivek Vadoliya captures the aspiring performers at the Shree Samarth Vyayam Mandir institute in Mumbai. Vadoliya’s vibrant work, rich in hues of ochre and red, explores notions of identity and community. “I was captivated by the expression and language of the movement,” he says. “In their gestures we recognise poses from yoga, which for me are not only mesmerising but inherently Indian.” Vadoliya’s work, which draws from his experience as a second-generation British Indian, is a celebration of the brown body and a love letter to his once-forgotten ancestral exercise. AH Mallakhamb by Vivek Vadoliya is published by Antihero Press, £35
Filmmaker David Ondaatje takes readers on an aerial journey over the world’s waters in his new book. In a fishing community in British Columbia, the rivers run deep grey, almost black in September; in Tuscany, off Punta Ala Beach, the water glows algae-green, while a giant lilo transports a group of swimmers through the calm waters; and in Montana, once-teeming spring creeks are now peacefully free from fishermen, following an intervention by conservationists.
Ondaatje showcases the myriad uses of these waters while also documenting their increasing overuse, as well as the risks they face from global warming and agricultural exploitation. BS Water Views: Rivers, Lakes, Oceans by David Ondaatje is published by Monacelli at $45
There may be two kinds of bookcase owners: those who own more books than they can accommodate, cramming tomes into every crevice – and those who dot their shelves with artfully placed stacks, and have space to burn on potted plants and framed photos.
And then there’s Ashley Tisdale, whose bookshelves are just empty. The High School Musical star recently went viral for admitting to Architectural Digest that she had rushed to fill the in-built shelves in her Hollywood Hills home specifically for an on-camera tour.
“These bookshelves, I have to be honest, actually did not have books in [them] a couple of days ago,” Tisdale said. “I had my husband go to a bookstore, like, ‘You need to get 400 books.’” (Her husband’s alternative plan, of “collecting books over time, and putting them in the shelves”, Tisdale promptly dismissed.)
A Twitter pile-on naturally ensued. “I am speechless,” declared the tweeter who first circulated the clip.
But it turns out the bookshelf bulk-buy is standard practice among the rich and famous – and increasingly so, since books have become established as an erudite backdrop for Zoom.
According to MailOnline, Adele spent more than £1,000 in a spree at Daunt Books before the pandemic, “pulling books off the shelves without even looking at the spines or reading the blurbs”.
At least Adele bought them herself, points out Miles de Lange, an interior designer at Potterton Books, a specialist book supplier. He says interior designers are often charged with supplying books for clients. “They are props, just like you buy a little objet.”
But filling shelves with desirable coffee-table books can cost as much as £5,000 – which clients rarely want to spend, says De Lange. “They’ll give you £1,000, and you can buy 20, but it’s not enough to fill a wall.” The compromise is often a stack of two or three books, with a vase or knick-knack on top.
‘At least Adele bought the books herself’ … the singer and her bookcase. Photograph: YouTube
If you do have the budget to splash around on books you won’t read, there are dedicated bookshelf curators such as Thatcher Wine, whom Gwyneth Paltrow hired on finding herself some 600 books short after a home renovation.
Wine’s company Juniper Books sells sets of classic literature with custom jackets – a patented approach, he explains, that allows someone to own “the complete works of Jane Austen, but in a certain Pantone chip colour that matches the rest of the room”.
Juniper Books and its Colorado “showroom” may seem like the ultimate celebrity foible, but since the pandemic some bookshops have started offering shelf curation services. Publishers, too, accept that many do judge books by their covers.
Penguin’s Clothbound Classics series of titles like Ulysses and Emma with Instagram-friendly covers has been hugely successful, with a box set spotted on the Duchess of Cambridge’s desk; a small-format range of 48 titles is coming in August.
The Little Clothbound Classics, out in August. Photograph: Penguin
Bea Carvalho, head of fiction at Waterstones, says books with strong design tend to get shared on social media, driving sales: “Having beautiful images to show off is so important … Sprayed edges go down very well on BookTok and Instagram.”
It has encouraged the industry to innovate. Waterstones’ special edition of Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus – out Tuesday, and tipped as the book of the summer – has exclusive endpapers, displaying the periodic table.
It is a fantastic novel, adds Carvalho, but the design does it justice: “If you love a book, you want to display it proudly.”
It is for that reason, Karen Howes of interior design studio Taylor Howes says, designers with a book-buying brief tend to stick to non-fiction, not novels. She tends to “dress the bookcase” with titles relating to her clients’ interests such as wine or aviation – “so that when their friends come it does feel like they have selected all their books themselves”.
Novels are where you would get caught out, Howes says: “‘Have you read the latest so-and-so?’ – and you haven’t.”
Bookshelves styled by Taylor Howes. Photograph: Astrid Templier/Taylor Howes Designs
The rise of working from home has allowed for exposure on an even greater scale. The Twitter account @BookcaseCredibility, followed by more than 115,000 people, collates screenshots of celebrities’ bookish backdrops, arguing: “What you say is not as important as the bookcase behind you.”
In a video interview with Vogue from her LA home, Adele’s shelves were recently revealed to bear titles such as The Mosaics of Rome and Japanese Prints. “There are some good ones up there,” she said as the camera panned across.
Likewise, a close study of Tisdale’s shelves reveals celebrity biographies, reference books, cookbooks and titles on fashion, psychology, wealth generation and self-help – her taste for fiction seeming to extend only to a novel by Ken Follett.
Tisdale was at least good-humoured about the criticism she received, sharing her favourite book recommendations (and asking for more) in a post to her lifestyle website Frenshe. She apologised for being slow to respond: “I’ve recently just got a lot of new books to get through.” At least she can see the shelf as half-full.
During a psychotic episode, the artist picks up his knife and cuts off his ear, the blood spills on to the canvas and blooms into a bunch of beautiful sunflowers. As Plato explained, “All of the excellent poets are not in their right thoughts when they make their lovely songs.” They are mere receptacles by which suffering flows and translates alone into art. This is, of course, absurd. The image of the tortured artist has developed and develop into progressively entrenched, romanticised in order to paint a neat photograph of the website link amongst struggling and artwork.
The truth of the matter is far much more complicated. Quite usually artists make good perform in spite of their struggling. Quite a few many others are not able to work at all. Imagine a gallery whole of the great operates of artwork made if we could have prevented the hardships that had been insurmountable obstructions to so lots of. Grayson Perry recommended the financial impacts of Covid could be a good point, clearing out the “dead wood”. The neoliberal lie of the personal, the inventive genius able to prosper however awful the disorders.
In my new book, Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the Art of Getting Misplaced at Sea, I examine many kinds of struggling. Géricault’s, survivors of the raft, my buddy Ali’s ordeals of blindness and war, and my individual buried traumas. I needed to pull again the curtain, to get inside the intricate community of procedures that see struggling translated into art. But also to go past the spectacle of it all, to believe how art may well enable, might offer you a light-weight in darkness – as these textbooks do.
1. The Iceberg by Marion Coutts Coutts is a celebrated visible artist, and her husband, Tom Lubbock, was a renowned artwork critic. The Iceberg meticulously charts the journey from his analysis with a terminal brain tumour, via to his loss of life. As Lubbock’s words and phrases are stolen, their little one learns to converse. The surgical precision with which Coutts employs language to remember this is a deeply impacting counterpoint. Constantly seeking for and getting the right terms, because in that look for, by way of all the suffering, it is a portrait of, and hymn to, appreciate.
2. The Dying of Francis Bacon by Max Porter Set in the last days of the artist as he lies in a convent medical center bed in Madrid, Porter looks to enter Bacon’s intellect, daily life and entire body, and the paintings he manufactured. He works by using language like paint, or a surgeon’s blade. It is visceral, messy stuff, phrases chucked and smeared like system fluids spilling more than the web page in wild imagistic flurries. Porter truly gets Bacon, seriously understands that under all that sound there is generally elegance, that the real truth beneath is a deep very well of mourning and melancholy.
3. The Lonely Town by Olivia Laing In this meditation on loneliness, Laing finds herself caught in the paradox of town lifetime, the teeming masses only exacerbating her inner thoughts of alienation. She moves fluidly from Edward Hopper’s legendary, theatrical scenes of urban isolation, by to Andy Warhol’s lifelong presentation and functionality of mechanistic separation and link. Her portrait of outsider artist Henry Darger is going and original, recontextualising his violent, wonderful, unsettling eroticism not as accredited signifier of a disturbed thoughts but as indicator of the harm caused by a society that forces people today into the margins. Laing’s e book, like Darger’s do the job, is a call to be read and observed.
4. Purple Comet by Heather Clark With its concentrate on new study products Clark manages to provide a new line of inquiry to Sylvia Plath’s daily life and get the job done. So often Plath’s remarkable poetry is overshadowed by the preoccupation with her suicide, her troubled partnership with Ted Hughes and her mental wellbeing. The suffering is never ignored here, but it does not ever overwhelm or search for to lazily suggest it is the root of Plath’s genius. As an alternative, we are still left to revel in a brain capable of occupying an unrestricted selection of lives, encounters and feelings.
5. What the Drinking water Gave Me by Pascale Petit A selection of poems impressed by the paintings and lifestyle of Frida Kahlo. It is a lifestyle complete of struggling and the poems in no way shy absent from this: they are suffused with sensation, feeling and Jungian explorations of the unconscious. Nonetheless it is the paintings, conjured by the poems, which present the most compelling portrait of an artist, words performing like threads in a tapestry of staggering complexity and splendor. This is a assortment which by no means shies from the wounds, which demonstrates the healing that can transpire when trauma is remodeled into paint, and then yet again into words.
Trailblazer … St Cecilia Taking part in a Lute, circa 1616, by Artemisia Gentileschi. Photograph: Alamy
6. Artemisia by Anna Banti Banti saw her household ruined by German bombs in Italy, taking with it the first draft of her novel. The resulting rewrite is not an act of replication, but appears to be suffused with the connection that Banti felt via this loss. At details, the novel is dreamlike in its retelling of the lifestyle and function of the baroque painter and trailblazer Artemisia Gentileschi. Gentileschi experienced a litany of abuses, but her rape and the subsequent demo threatened to be life defining. It is by means of her operate, and through this reimagining of a everyday living by Banti, that this is not allowed to occur.
7. Shiny Stars: Wonderful Artists Who Died Way too Young by Kate Bryan A stunningly manufactured e book, covering the do the job and life of 30 artists who died before they have been 40. Each individual text is accompanied by a vivid portrait of every single artist by illustrator Anna Higgie, and illustrations of their crucial work. However Bryan intelligently problems the often simplistic backlinks between biographical suffering and the get the job done produced. The resulting texts are complete of nuance and delicate analysis. The book’s true energy is its target on artists these as Francesca Woodman, Khadija Saye and Helen Chadwick, running to not shy away from the suffering they skilled by holding the lens concentrated on the electric power of their get the job done.
8. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine Rankine’s e-book-length lyric poem/essay about race relations in the US moves fluidly between dialogue of everyday racism through to the express and structural. The full material of culture satisfies her gaze, from the artwork of JMW Turner to the writings of James Baldwin and Robert Lowell, anecdotes of microaggressions, examination of the media about police shootings, the YouTube performances of Hennessy Youngman and her collaboration with John Lucas.
9. Maus by Art Spiegelman A graphic novel in which the Nazis are cats and the Jews are mice, an incredible oral record of Vladek Spiegelman’s everyday living. A metatext in which his son, Art, attempts to occur to phrases with his father’s past and their subsequently challenging romance. The graphic novel format allows Maus to artfully transfer among the unimaginable suffering of the Holocaust, survivor’s guilt and the far more mundane suffering of old age, petty familial and domestic arguments. Its concentration on the distinct and the personalized are what make it able of tackling metaphysical and existential concerns close to human cruelty and the nature of struggling.
10. E-book of Mutter by Kate Zambreno A book that collages fragments of memory, mourning and essayistic engagements with art, photography and textual content. Principally about Zambreno’s working experience of grief subsequent the loss of life of her mom, but turning into a broader meditation on time, and on composing as a form of repair service. The reserve can take its sort and sensation from Louise Bourgeois’ cell sculptures, presenting up the chance that the screams and silences of suffering might be assembled and circled, but never circumscribed. It writes into and all around absences, a sacred secular prayer to the past.
Wreck: Gericault’s Raft and the Artwork of Currently being Dropped at Sea by Tom de Freston is published by Granta. To enable the Guardian and Observer, purchase your duplicate from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery expenses may perhaps utilize.
The impressionists had a name for the glow bestowed on a scene by snowfall: effet de neige, “snow effect”. It’s a phenomenon captured in London in the Snow, a book documenting flurries, falls and drifts in the city throughout the 20th century. In one image, the neon signage of Piccadilly Circus is tempered by a snowfall, while in another children on their way to school in Peckham smile out from underneath a blur of drifting flakes.
London in the Snow, published by Hoxton Mini Press at £16.95
The images, curated from several archives, capture a simultaneous stillness and frenzy. One photograph from 1962 shows a milkman skiing down a snow-carpeted road to deliver his glass bottles, while others capture the chaos of snowball fights, and cyclists navigating icy streets. But there’s also a peacefulness to the capital: a snowman sitting quietly on an empty bench. A snow-dusted bubble-car smiling at passersby with a newly drawn face. “An enchanting muffled stillness,” as art and photography writer Lucy Davies writes in her introduction. BAYA SIMONS
Milton Avery’s luminous canvases have led some to call him “the American Matisse”. Born in late-19th-century New York State to a working-class family, he left school at 16 to work in a factory, and for several years did night shifts so that he could paint in the day. Though he did receive some recognition, and was a significant influence on artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, he also fell between movements (too abstract for the realists, too representational for the abstract expressionists), and never got the same dues as his peers – until now.
Milton Avery: American Colourist, published by the Royal Academy of Arts at £25
This month an exhibition, opening in Texas and travelling to London’s Royal Academy next year, is set to bring the master colourist’s work to a wider audience. Comprising around 70 of Avery’s sherbet-toned paintings from the 1930s to the 1960s – often depicting holiday scenes in Maine and Cape Cod – the show and accompanying book will explore his contribution to American modernism. “There have been several others in our generation who have celebrated the world around them,” Rothko said of the painter, who died in 1965, “but none with that inevitability where the poetry penetrated every pore of the canvas to the very last tip of the brush.” BS
Milton Avery: American Colourist is at Fort Worth, Texas, until 30 January 2022, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from 15 July to 16 October, 2022. The accompanying book is published by the Royal Academy of Arts at £25
A visual journey through the politics and fictions of American architecture
A new book from American photographer and writer Jeffrey Ladd, A Field Measure Survey of American Architecture, takes readers on a gripping “road trip” through the buildings of the 19th- and 20th-century United States. It presents a hypnotic sequence of photos of houses from the Historic American Buildings Survey’s archive, weaving along the Mason-Dixon line to create a documentary-style architectural portrait.
While the exteriors, with their clapboard façades, crumbling neoclassical pillars, smashed windows or overgrown ivy evoke a narrative of design left to decay, interior shots reveal a more intimate social commentary: stories of class, race and sinister happenings – from engraved doorknobs, portraits of horses and Chinese characters to a punchbag in a kitchen and a saw in a cluttered living room. The book forms a question: what can images of houses say about a country? “Among the vast beauty the pictures hold,” says Ladd, now based in Cologne, “there is fragility and often signs of devastating violence that seem to mirror the current climate of my former country.” KYRA HO
A Scarlet Surprise apple from Oregon, as seen in Odd Apples
The Pale Gala apple from New York
From the book of Genesis to Snow White, few fruits have held so much fascination in art and literature as the apple. A new publication from New York-based photographer William Mullan adds to this history. Mullan, who works as a marketing manager for an artisanal chocolatier by day, first became interested in apples as a schoolchild in rural England when he came across the Egremont Russet.
Odd Apples by William Mullan (Hatje Cantz, $18)
Entranced by its gnarled, potato-like appearance and rich, nutty flavour, he embarked on a journey to discover and document other rare varieties. Odd Apples chronicles some 90 rare types, each set against vividly coloured backdrops and with its origins and flavour noted. From the rosy-fleshed Californian Pink Pearl to the speckled Black Oxford and those rough-skinned russets, Mullan’s compendium celebrates the beauty and idiosyncrasies of each cultivar in technicolour glory. SARA SEMIC
Odd Apples by William Mullan is published by Hatje Cantz at $18
Discovered on a dancefloor in Düsseldorf in 1987, Claudia Schiffer went on to lead some of the most defining fashion campaigns of the 1990s. She was well-placed, then, to curate the new exhibition and book, Captivate! Fashion Photography from the ’90s, on show at Düsseldorf’s Kunstpalast Museum. From Helmut Newton’s provocative portraits to Corinne Day’s more candid images, the exhibition showcases familiar pictures alongside unseen material from Schiffer’s personal archive, as well as a Q&A between the model and Felix Krämer.
Captivate! Fashion Photography from the ’90s, curated by Claudia Schiffer (Prestel, £49.99)
“The ’90s was about energy, reality and personality, and I wanted to encapsulate that big shift,” says Schiffer, who became one of the era’s great supermodels, best known for her work with Karl Lagerfeld, Ellen von Unwerth and Herb Ritts. “There’s a sense of ‘why not?’,” Schiffer adds of the relevance of the decade today, “and a desire to live life better, to experiment, to collaborate. As we learn to socialise and live IRL once again, the ’90s values resonate.” NINI BARBAKADZE
An article about noise complaints first got photographer Alice Mann interested in the subculture of the “drummies”; neighbours were griping about the young drum majorettes rehearsing at a school in Cape Town. This woman-only sport – a combination of dance, flag-waving and baton-twirling in formation – was first introduced in the city’s street parades in the 1970s, but its popularity waned in recent years. It inspired the South African-born, London-based Mann to travel around schools in her home country in order to document this little-known scene.
Now this series – which won the prestigious Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize in 2018 – is brought together in a new title, accompanied by an exhibition at Kunsthal Rotterdam. Dressed in their distinctive brightly coloured, sequin-trimmed uniforms, the girls gaze into Mann’s lens with a confidence and poise that speaks to their pride in being a “drummie” – a title that is seen as a privilege and an achievement, particularly within the marginalised communities which many of them come from. “In a world where so many sporting opportunities are still focused on men,” writes Mann, “I want these images to function as testament to the commitment and determination of these young female athletes.” SS
Alice Mann: Drummies is published by GOST Books at £40. The exhibition Drummies is showing at Kunsthal Rotterdam until 23 January 2022
Sophie Calle surveils the enigmatic lives of anonymous hotel guests
A detail from “Room 44” in The Hotel by Sophie Calle
In 1981, French writer and conceptual artist Sophie Calle took a job as a temporary chambermaid in a Venetian hotel. As she cleaned each room, she photographed the guests’ belongings using a camera stashed inside her mop bucket, and meticulously recorded her observations in a journal (“six suits for the man, and 12 silk blouses for the woman”). The resulting series is now being published for the first time as a standalone book, The Hotel.
Calle’s observations explore the everyday debris of hotel guests – a silk nightgown spread across two single beds, a pair of Venetian masks, neatly made or disarrayed beds, false teeth lurking inside a suitcase. There are also unsettling and strange scenes: a lobster claw wrapped in the folds of a sheet; a briefcase containing a hot-water bottle; a hammer next to a rubbish bag. Together they ask what our habits and possessions might reveal about us and whether our curiosity about the private lives of others is normal or shameful. Like many of Calle’s projects, the work of art is in her act of intrusion; the resulting photographs are merely the eerily beautiful evidence. BS
The Hotel by Sophie Calle is published by Siglio at $39.95
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As an elementary librarian, I work very closely with the art teacher at my school. Our friendship and the proximity of our workspaces is definitely one reason, but the natural pairing of art and books is the main. Picture book biographies, stories about community art projects, illustrations that teach different art forms, even art activity books themselves highlight how art and books go together like peanut butter and jelly. Comfortable and classic. With this in mind, I’ve put together a list that includes art books for kids I’ve sourced while creating lessons and others I’ve hunted down to gift to kids from age 1 to 92, Get Auto Repair.
You could be looking for art books for kids for any number of reasons. Maybe you’re encouraging a budding artist in your home. Maybe you’re getting a jump on your holiday shopping. Maybe you’re reconnecting with your own childlike sense of wonder. Children are natural artists, and the books I’ve included in this round up all touch on the magic that happens before inhibitions kick in and we begin to doubt ourselves. Whether you’re looking to learn about famous artists or get the skills to become a famous artist yourself, there is something for everyone in this list below.
Art Stories For Kids
Maybe Something Beautiful: How Art Transformed a Neighborhood by F. Isabel Campoy, Teresa Howell, and Rafael López
This lovely book follows a young girl named Mira. Her personal art and paintings inspire the entire community to brighten their dull neighborhood with fantastic murals. Gorgeous illustrations will inspire!
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Anywhere Artist by Nikki Slade Robinson
A celebration of the fact that art is everywhere and can be made from anything! This simple story follows a young artist as they create found art from everything around them, Get Auto Repair.
Swatch: The Girl Who Loved Color by Julia Denos
An exuberant explosion of color and celebration of the wildness of art. This free-spirited story will delight little artmakers and their parents alike.
Art Biographies for Kids
The Met Georgia O’Keeffe: She saw the world in a flower by Gabrielle Balkan and Josy Bloggs
This newer series, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gives background and craft insight about different visual artists. In this installment, we learn what inspired Georgia O’Keeffe to look closely at and paint the natural world.
The Met Faith Ringgold: Narrating the World in Pattern and Color by Sharna Jackson and Andrea Pippins
From the aforementioned series put out by The Met, this book introduces young readers to the stirring work of Faith Ringgold. Budding artists interested in sewing or scrap art will be drawn in by descriptions of Ringgold’s fabric illustrations.
Zaha Hadid (Little People, BIG DREAMS) by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara and Asun Amar
The Little People, Big Dreams series does a great job of covering subjects from across disciplines, and this title about Zaha Hadid, a sharp architect, is one of the best, Get Auto Repair.
Art Activity Books for Kids
Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media-For Budding Artists of All Ages by Susan Schwake and Rainer Schwake
Want to give a child a year’s worth of art lessons in a single tome? This is the book for you. Interaction, approachable lessons are grouped by medium and offer hands-on exploration of everything art.
Stone Painting for Kids: Designs to Spark Your Creativity by F. Sehnaz Bac
Rock painting has really taken on a new life in the past few years, and this book can guide young ones in creating small, portable works of art that can be displayed in homes or slipped into nature to delight unwitting neighbors.
What We Believe: A Black Lives Matter Principles Activity Book by Laleña Garcia and Caryn Davidson
An art activity book with meaning! This book, developed by two seasoned educators, presents the 13 principles of the Black Lives Matter movement in child friendly language. Each principle has a place for reflection and a striking coloring page.
All the Things: How to Draw Books for Kids by Alli Koch
It is what it says it is: easy-to-follow mini lessons that teach young artists how to draw…everything. A great gift for a child who is always doodling, or an adult who misses being a child who doodles.
Art Books for Babies
Goodnight, Starry Night by Amy Guglielmo and Julie Appel
Baby’s first art book? This board book introduces the tiniest readers to class works of art in a format that can stand up to any slobber or slime.
Art for Baby
Once Baby has the classics, it’s time for them to meet some modern artists. This board book is made up of infant-friendly black and white images designed by modern masters. The contrast is for the kiddos, but the adults will love it, too.
Pantone: Colors by Helen Dardik
There is no shortage of board books that teach the colors, but Pantone has given the concept a fresh face. Punchy graphics matching the Pantone color being taught will be enjoyed by all readers.
Art Reference Books for Kids
The Ultimate Art Museum by Ferren Gipson
This book is a museum. Think: the cafe, the lobby, the tourists, the galleries, the narration…this book is a museum. An excellent gift for a young art lover or even just someone who hasn’t made it to an in-person cultural experience in awhile.
Women in Art: 50 Fearless Creatives Who Inspired the World by Rachel Ignotofsky
This informative, encyclopedic book includes everyone from giants of the art world to lesser known heroes, highlighting work across time periods and artistic mediums. The dreamy, quirky illustrations will introduce readers to a new favorite artist: Rachel Ignotofsky, the author.
Hopefully you found something to scratch that creative itch! If not, these might help your search: Drawing Books for Kids or Art Books for Preschoolers. Best of luck, artists!
