Coffee Table Books: Feasts for the Eyes
They’re big. They’re heavy. And, for the most part, they’re gorgeous. They touch on a broad gamut of subjects, making any subject grand. Ralph Waldo Emerson (in his poem, The Rhodora) wrote, “Beauty is its own excuse for being.” That pretty much sums up my feeling about coffee table books. These books are their own excuse for being and my standard excuse for the amount of space they take up right in the middle of the living room. And, on the floor, beside my night table. And on their sides atop bookshelves strategically spread around the house.
There are the gardening books, my favorite being Irish Gardens (one of a series from Country Living), and the nature books, like Roloff Beny’s classic To Everything There is a Season. Marrying the physical world and its artistic representation are Natural Worlds and Birds, two visual extravaganzas featuring the brilliant brushwork of Robert Bateman.
No coffee table collection would be complete without art books. I’ve got several, including Carlo Pedretti’s Leonardo da Vinci and the fantastic Masters of Deception. 
There are the architectural books, reaching back in time with Beny’s The Pleasure of Ruins and bringing the past forward with Castles of the World and Victorian Glory (which is set, only somewhat surprisingly, in San Francisco). Art and architecture merge with a visual feast of light and color in Stained Glass. This book shows the vitality and versatility of an art form that spans over 1000 years. Glass also comes alive in Vivienne Couldrey’s The Art of Tiffany. Louis Comfort Tiffany’s creativity was prodigious and found form in stained glass, mosaic, pottery, enamels, tapestries, jewellery and even furniture.
The Art of Illuminated Manuscripts serves as the perfect book-end to a collection on religious art forms. It features a selection of magnificent illustrations from the most significant and most sacred writings: Hebrew, Samaritan, Coptic and Arabic manuscripts, The Gospel of St Augustine, the Welsh Psalter of Ricemarch, the Silos Apocalypse with its Visigothic script, and, of course, what some consider the most beautiful and most tantalizing of all tomes, The Book of Kells.
Speaking of the past, if you are a Sherlock Holmes fan, check out Sherlock Holmes in London. Charles Viney walks you through the huge, fog-bound, romantic and sinister world of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Phototgraphs taken between 1879 and 1914 link you to events in your favorite Sherlock stories. Rosanna Negrotti provides the same service in Joyce’s Dublin. If you’ve read Joyce’s Ulysses, you’ll want to visit The Martello Tower in Sandycove; it is here, in the “squat, fat tower” that Ulysses begins, with Buck Mulligan descending its central stairway.
Marketing buffs will want to take a look back at the evolution of advertising over the past two centuries. A great place to start is Advertising in America: The First 200 Years. 50 years of Breck girls and Kodak cameras, and 100 years of Coca Cola, captured in 566 illustrations, arguably provide “greater insight into the social and economic life of America than a whole shelf of conventional histories”.
As you might imagine, there is very little work and a lot of play in these books. The child in us will enjoy the nostalgia and ingenuity of The Golden Age of Toys. It will also adore The Doll House Book, “an illustrated guide to miniature mansions, little living rooms, cozy castles, diminutive dwellings, small shops, and the dolls and furnishings that inhabit them”. For the boys (like me) who like bigger toys, there is Cars: The Classic Collection, a two-volume boxed set of classic and exotic automobiles.
What these books all have in common is their mission: to delight the eye, to beautifully capture in photography or illustration a sense of place or history or artistry. They are easy reads…any time, between time reads, that don’t force you to hunker down for a long siege. They make no apologies and neither should you.
