The Best Gift Books of 2008 By DWIGHT GARNER

The Best Gift Books of 2008 By DWIGHT GARNER

“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here,” James Agee declared in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” his 1941 classic about tenant farmers in Alabama. “It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron.”

Mr. Agee, an extremist in all things, meant what he wrote. But there is a similar impulse at work in all the best art and photography books, as well as in those unclassifiable volumes we call “gift books,” as if no sane mortal would purchase them for himself. These outsize and piquing books wish to be sensory experiences; they work to bring the world into our hands in such a way that text is, largely, superfluous.
Scrapbooks: An American History
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By Jessica Helfand (Yale University Press/Winterhouse Editions, $45). The best of this year’s gift books, “Scrapbooks” would make Agee — whose quotation above she approvingly cites — very happy. Ms. Helfand’s soulful volume is a sampling of some 200 historical scrapbooks, a few from famous personages (Anne Sexton, Lillian Hellman), but most the work of forgotten romantics and obsessives, who filled their scrapbooks with evocative artifacts like menus, telegrams, pressed flowers, ticket stubs, firecrackers, soap labels and locks of hair.

These scrapbooks, beautifully presented here, are “unauthorized one-offs,” Ms. Helfand writes in her hyperarticulate introduction. They represent a “virtually unexplored visual vernacular, a world of makeshift means and primitive methods, of gestural madness and unruly visions, of piety and poetry and a million private plagiarisms.” (Warning: Do not get Ms. Helfand started on the current scrapbooking fad, a perky and homogenized “memory industry” she deplores.)
Old Rare New: The Independent Record Shop

Edited by Emma Pettit (Black Dog Publishing, $29.95). This is another book I fell hard for this year, and it feels like a kind of scrapbook itself. The book is an elegiac love poem to the vanishing independent record shops in the United States and Britain, which are being killed off by the Internet and one of its many demon spawn, the MP3. “Old Rare New” is not an especially lovely thing to look at; it’s got the hodge-podge visual sensibility of a 1980s ’zine. But it is stuffed with photographs, interviews and images of weird old album covers, and it expertly captures “the madness that oozes” out of a record owner’s skin and “perfumes their shops.”

If you’re over a certain age and own (or owned) a lot of vinyl, “Old Rare New” will be a heartbreaker. Here is one store owner, David Lashmar, talking about today’s iPod generation, in language you practically want to declaim, as if it were Whitman: “They will never know the joy of flicking through a rack of records, being captivated by cover artwork and reading the sleeve notes. Of getting the record home, sliding it reverentially out of its cover and then out of its inner sleeve, marveling at the luster of the grooves. The sacrificial offering onto the altar of the turntable, the gentle penetration of the spindle, the lowering of the arm and the total bliss of being part of an actual performance that you have helped to complete. This baptismal immersion into sonic joy will never leave you. The day you bought the record, where you were, what you were wearing and who was in your heart, will be etched into your soul, as well defined as the grooves that are pressed into your record.” Mr. Lashmar’s reference to “who was in your heart” — man, that gets me every time. Can I get an “Amen” while I wipe a tear onto the sleeve of my torn J. Geils Band concert T-shirt?
Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript
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Text by Bob Dylan and photographs by Barry Feinstein (Simon & Schuster, $30). “Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric” is another book with a strange, scarred, resonating old soul. This book is made up of 23 of Mr. Dylan’s cosmic prose poems, written in the 1960s, inspired by a series of Mr. Feinstein’s moody black-and-white photographs of movie stars, casting couches and back lots. As Luc Sante writes in his introduction, “Although the photographs were made for a variety of assignments and in a number of different contexts, they have a remarkable consistency and a clearly identifiable theme: the passing of old Hollywood.” Mr. Feinstein’s pictures, reminiscent of both Robert Frank’s and Diane Arbus’s, are impossible to turn away from. And Mr. Dylan’s poems? Well, they aren’t totally unreadable. But they will not send you rushing back for a critical reconsideration of “Tarantula.”
Annie Leibovitz: At Work

(Random House, $40). This small, elegant volume is in many ways among Ms. Leibovitz's most personal books; in it she reprints some of her most famous images and tells the stories behind them, and she speaks of her photographic philosophy. There are good stories here about taking mescaline with Hunter S. Thompson and attending NASA parties with Tom Wolfe while he was reporting “The Right Stuff.” And there are little surprises scattered along the trail. When Ms. Leibovitz, who has created portraits of nearly every well-known person on the planet, talks about charisma, the first name she conjures up is Nicole Kidman’s. “There’s not a bad way to photograph her,” Ms. Leibovitz writes, adding that quirky things add to her allure: “The way Nicole Kidman looks from behind when she walks away, for instance. The way she stands. Not many people are good at standing.”
Richard Avedon Performance

(Abrams, $75). This is a well-chosen retrospective from a photographer whose long career enabled him to take important photographs of culturally distant figures like Buster Keaton (in 1952) and Cat Power (in 2003). In his essay John Lahr says it all: “Shut your eyes and think of the following people: Marilyn Monroe, Jean Renoir, Truman Capote, Buster Keaton, Bert Lahr, Bob Dylan, Katharine Hepburn, Igor Stravinsky, Lena Horne, Oscar Levant, Ezra Pound, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Chicago Seven, Marianne Moore, Robert Frank, Willem de Kooning, Audrey Hepburn, Rudolf Nureyev, Judy Garland, Charlie Chaplin, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol, Bette Midler, Francis Bacon, Dorothy Parker, the Beatles. Chances are that what you first see in your mind’s eye is a photograph taken by Richard Avedon: crisp, scalpel-sharp, electric, an iconic distillation of the subject’s public persona or of his internal drama.” The photographs included here put me in mind of something Kenneth Tynan wrote, in the introduction to his profile collection “Show People,” about why he picked the essays he did: “Last and far from least, they all rank high on the list of people whom I would invite to an ideal dinner party.”
Athlete
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Photographs by Walter Iooss (Sports Illustrated, $34.95). This book is an ultraglossy, color-saturated, wide-format selection of images from America’s best-known sports photographer. His career has nearly been as long as Mr. Avedon’s; Mr. Iooss, who is still working, received his first assignment from Sports Illustrated in 1961, at the age of 16. There are classic and revealing shots here of people from Walt Frazier, Carl Yastrzemski, Arnold Palmer and Muhammad Ali to Tom Brady, David Beckham and Tiger Woods. It’s a book that bears out this contention, from Michael Jordan, in the book’s introduction: “From what I can tell, Walter has never taken a bad shot of anybody or anything.” Mr. Iooss’s stuff pops.
Library of Dust

Photographs by David Maisel. (Chronicle Books, $80). “Library of Dust” may well be this year’s most haunting book of images. It is a collection of photographs of copper canisters, each containing the unclaimed remains of a patient from a psychiatric hospital in Oregon (the same one used for filming “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”). Rivulets of chemical corrosion, almost oceanic in their intense coloring, run down the sides. Mr. Maisel’s book is a fevered meditation on memory, loss and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before.
Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds

(Chronicle Books, $50). Then there is this volume, which commences with Marilyn Monroe (Miss December, 1953) and closes with Sasckya Porto (Miss December, 2007). Along the way, we chart the changing trends in hairstyles, lighting techniques, bikini bottoms, living room décor and depilation. Wedged among the smiling naked women are essays by Robert Coover, Paul Theroux, Robert Stone, Jay McInerney, Daphne Merkin and Maureen Gibbon. About the centerfolds of the 1960s, Mr. Theroux writes: “In many cases these centerfolds are the epitome of American loveliness, our very own apsaras, with their creamy skins and bright smiles, the almost-awkward willingness in their postures, not hookers but prom queens and biker babes. For Americans who came of age in the 1960s, they are the girls of your dreams.”
Paper Illusions: The Art of Isabelle de Borchgrave
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By Barbara and René Stoeltie (Abrams, $75). This is among the most unusual and fascinating fashion books I’ve seen in a long time. Ms. de Borchgrave works an unusual form of magic: she creates dresses, representative of almost every era, from the courts of the Medici onward, from paper. These intricate paper dresses are not to be worn; they are to be astonished by. Even the purple prose of Barbara Stoeltie’s introduction (“Paper crackles and trembles. It whispers and rustles. It whistles and coos.” Coos?) is not enough to make you put this book down.
The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages 1851-2008

(Black Dog & Leventhal; $60). In terms of size and historical sweep, The New York Times has a mighty entry in this year’s gift book sweepstakes. It’s a volume that reproduces more than 300 of the most significant front pages of the past century and a half, and also contains 3 DVD-ROMs with all of the newspaper’s 54,267 front pages with links to the full articles.

Classic headlines like “OUR GREAT LOSS: Death of President Lincoln” and “ALLIED ARMIES LAND IN FRANCE IN THE HAVRE-CHERBOURG AREA; GREAT INVASION IS UNDER WAY” and “MEN WALK ON MOON” convey a remarkable historical immediacy. In the era before 24-hour cable news and countless Web sites, a newspaper headline was often the first public report of an event, and it could hit home like a happy telegram or a punch in the stomach.

Even in the Internet age, Bill Keller, The Times’s executive editor, writes in his introduction to “The Complete Front Pages,” “Page One is still what most stirs our ambition. Editors assure reporters that each page of the paper is precious, even those consisting of a narrow gutter alongside a department-store ad, but the front page is the showcase every reporter aspires to. Whether it comes shouted across a newsroom, telexed to a foreign bureau or in an e-mail message, there are few more satisfying phrases in our business than ‘You are fronted.’ ”

And as Mr. Keller notes, sometimes the more minor and more quixotic banner headlines are the most interesting, like this one from 1912: “MANIAC IN MILWAUKEE SHOOTS COL. ROOSEVELT; HE IGNORES WOUND, SPEAKS AN HOUR, GOES TO HOSPITAL.”
Additional Recommendations

I am out of space. Here are seven more books that impressed me, and I’d like to at least list their titles. So, in a sentence that’s about as long as a Twitter post, here goes: On the Origin of Species: The Illustrated Edition, by Charles Darwin, edited and with an introduction by David Quammen (Sterling, $35); The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, by Neil Harris (University of Chicago Press, $65); Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound, by Miyoko Chu with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (Chronicle Books, $60); The Harley-Davidson Motor Co. Archive Collection, by Randy Leffingwell and Darwin Holmstrom (Motorbooks, $60); You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story, by Richard Schickel and George Perry (Running Press, $50); With Strings Attached: The Art and Beauty of Vintage Guitars, by the novelist Jonathan Kellerman (Ballantine Books, $75); and The DC Vault, by Martin Pasko (Running Press, $49.95), a kind of bootleg archive of blissful ephemera from the DC Comics archives.

“When I get a little money, I buy books,” Erasmus said. “And if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” Times are tough; big lavish books aren’t inexpensive; we can’t always shop with Erasmus’s high-minded priorities. But some of the titles included here are manageable on tight budgets. And even the luxe volumes are probably still cheaper than clothes and will last longer than food; and if for some reason they don’t appeal to the gift recipient, they’re easier than either to rewrap and put under someone else’s tree.