Coffee Table Books By DWIGHT GARNER

Coffee Table Books By DWIGHT GARNER

Libraries call their bookshelves "stacks," but the only purposeful book-stacking most of us do is on our coffee tables, where books are shuffled on and off like favorite playlists on an iPod.

Coffee tables are places for odd juxtapositions. Part of the pleasure of gift books — those chic, jumbo volumes about music and art, history and science, film and fashion — is watching them rub up against one another and throw off sparks. It’s even better, of course, to pull one off the pile. Flipping through these books is like gallery-going without the gallery; the best of them crack open teeming worlds of color and pageantry and intellect and sometimes even chaos.
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'The Jazz Loft Project'
By SAM STEPHENSON
The most chaotic and soulful gift book this year is, no contest, "The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965," by Sam Stephenson. The book has a forlorn and gripping story to tell, about how Smith, the Life magazine photographer, left his job and his family to hole up for eight years in a dilapidated building in Midtown Manhattan. He was supposed to be completing a photo essay about the city of Pittsburgh. But as he became obsessed with the building and the famous jazz musicians who gathered in it to play at night (and as he became increasingly addicted to alcohol and amphetamines), the Pittsburgh project became a memory, and Smith began recording the goings-on at 821 Sixth Avenue full time.

It was a kind of one-man multimedia happening. From 1957 to 1965, Smith made roughly 40,000 pictures of the jazz players and the street life outside his window, and he rigged much of the building for sound, taping off-the-cuff performances by Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Zoot Sims and many others. He also taped chunks of disembodied sound from radio and television: a speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the first Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight, Jason Robards reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Crack-Up" and dozens of other oddities.

Mr. Stephenson, a writer and teacher at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, spent seven years wading through this previously unseen material, and he has curated it beautifully — giving us not just Smith’s brooding photographs, but also printing transcripts of bits of late-night talk among the jazz men and things like snippets of William Faulkner reading from his 1932 novel "Light in August" on WYNC. The book is an elegiac stew of sight and sound, and a singularly weird, vital and thrumming American document. (Knopf, $40)
['The Jazz Loft Project']
'Herblock: The Life and Work of the Great Political Cartoonist'
By HAYNES JOHNSON and HARRY KATZ
Herbert L. Block — better known as Herblock — is probably, after Thomas Nast, the most important political cartoonist America has produced, and "Herblock: The Life and Work of the Great Political Cartoonist" by Haynes Johnson and Harry Katz, is a deft and timely reminder of why he mattered.

Herblock’s career nearly spanned the century, from the 1929 stock market crash through the first years of George W. Bush’s presidency, and along the way he won three Pulitzer Prizes for his syndicated cartoons. Hundreds of them are reprinted here: they are warm, witty, blunt and devastatingly effective.

In his introduction, the journalist Haynes Johnson expertly explains why Herblock’s cartoons still resonate. It wasn’t merely that he relentlessly attacked "governmental secrecy, abuses of power, religious bigots, sexism, racism, and, always, public hypocrisy wherever and whenever it arose," Mr. Johnson writes. It was also that he "always stood for the underdog, and for the everyman and everywomen among us trapped in, or frustrated by, the ever more complicated nature of modern life." (Norton, $35)
['Herblock: The Life and Work of the Great Political Cartoonist']
'The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York'
By MATTEO PERICOLI
Anyone who has seen Matteo Pericoli’s book, "Manhattan Unfurled" (2001), published shortly after 9/11, hasn’t forgotten it. The book consisted of two 37-foot-long drawings — one of the entire East Side of Manhattan as seen from the water, and one of the entire West Side — which folded neatly into one beautiful and profoundly endearing book.

Mr. Pericoli’s new book, no less expressive, is "The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York." It’s another unusual meditation on the feel of New York City. This time, Mr. Pericoli has been invited into the apartments of 63 New Yorkers — some of them famous (Tom Wolfe, Mario Batali, Mikhail Baryshnikov) some of them not — and has drawn the views from their windows in elegant black and white.

Each is different, from the rooftop water tower outside Philip Glass’s apartment to the bare trees and brownstones across from Kurt Andersen’s. In a comment on his own view (a grid of buildings), David Byrne gets at something real about living in the city: "I think of my view as pretty typical for a New Yorker. We look out our windows at other windows. That, in a way, mirrors our lives here — we are constantly looking at each other, millions of us, on the streets and elsewhere." (Simon & Schuster, $21.99)
['The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York']
'Lincoln, Life-Size'
By PHILIP B. KUNHARDT III, PETER W. KUNHARDT and PETER W. KUNHARDT, JR.
Abraham Lincoln loved to make fun of his own looks. "I cannot see why all you artists want a likeness of me," he said, "unless it is because I am the homeliest man in the State of Illinois." Lincoln was actually, of course, in his way the most beautiful man America has produced; the contours of his seamed and wrinkled face invite rapt and repeated study. His intense gaze, sometimes grave, sometimes amused, can still stop you in your tracks.

"Lincoln, Life-Size," by Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr., collects dozens of portraits of Lincoln, taken across 20 years, from 1846 to 1865. Each is presented in both standard size and life size, and the effect is mesmerizing. "Artists and sculptors," Carl Sandburg wrote, "have spoken of the fascination and the profound involvements to be found in the face and physical form of Abraham Lincoln. The exterior man moved with some of the mystery of the interior man." (Knopf, $50)
['Lincoln, Life-Size']
'The Heart of the Great Alone'
By DAVID HEMPLEMAN-ADAMS, SOPHIE GORDON and EMMA STUART
"The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic Photography," by David Hempleman-Adams, Sophie Gordon and Emma Stuart, is a celebration of the work of two pioneering photographers: Herbert George Ponting, who traveled with Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910 Antarctic expedition, and Frank Hurley, who accompanied Ernest Shackleton on his four years later.

This book lovingly reproduces the best of their photographs (and prints some that have not previously been seen in book form), and brings the reader tantalizingly close to the heroes of these expeditions and the suffering and sorrow they endured. The text throughout is excellent; the authors describe Ponting’s famous photograph of a ship seen through a sloping ice grotto "as significant an image as Neil Armstrong standing on the moon for the first time." (Bloomsbury, $47.50)
['The Heart of the Great Alone']
'Baseball Americana: Treasures From the Library of Congress'
By HARRY KATZ, FRANK CERESI, PHIL MICHEL, WILSON McBEE and SUSAN REYBURN
Sorry, Cooperstown. The Library of Congress houses the world’s largest collection of baseball memorabilia, and this artful and overstuffed book presents the best of that material, from New Deal photographs to vintage baseball cards to classic advertisements. The book is a yea-saying celebration of the sport, and reminds us how everything about baseball has changed and yet nothing has. "If you took someone from the era of President McKinley at the end of the 19th century and put him or her in a ballpark early in the 21st century," George Will writes in his forward, "the time traveler would feel right at home." (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, $29.99)
['Baseball Americana: Treasures From the Library of Congress']
'Hands in Harmony: Traditional Crafts and Music in Appalachia'
By TIM BARNWELL
This excellent collection of black and white portraits and oral histories documents the lives of the makers of Appalachian music and traditional handicrafts, and arrives with a wickedly fine CD. There are photographs here of some well-known people (Doc Watson, Ralph Stanley, Bill Monroe), but the best are of unknown artists. Without Appalachian music, Jan Davidson writes in the forward, "there would be no Joan Baez, no Bob Dylan the folksinger, and surely no Grateful Dead." (Norton, $49.95)
'The World in Vogue: People, Parties, Places'
Introduction by HAMISH BOWLES; edited by ALEXANDRA KOTUR
It’s been 100 years since Condé Nast acquired Vogue, and this lavish book, packed with photography from the likes of Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Annie Leibovitz, chronicles the magazine’s high points and catches its plush, starry, elusive sensibility. Models, actresses, It girls, socialites and Trumps are captured in portraits and during air kisses and other unguarded moments. Paloma Picasso, in a 1981 Vogue interview, seemed to speak for everyone here: "To look good and to dress up isn’t just a favor you are doing for yourself — it’s a favor you are doing for the people around you." (Knopf, $75)
['The World in Vogue: People, Parties, Places']
'Pictorial Webster's: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities'
By JOHN M. CARRERA
A true oddity, this absorbing book, clearly a labor of love, collects engravings of hundreds of visual images from 19th-century editions of Webster’s dictionaries. "Webster’s images of things such as an anchor, an anvil, or Atlas have become iconic to our culture," the author writes, adding that these images constitute "an American attempt to illustrate pure forms." (Chronicle Books, $35)
'The Book of Exploration'
By RAY HOWGEGO
This handsome book, from the author of the four-volume "Encyclopedia of Exploration," is a chronological survey of the world’s most important and audacious explorations, from the circumnavigation of Africa in 600 B.C.E. to Roald Amundsen’s conquest of the Northwest Passage and well beyond. The illustrations — period maps, journals entries, photographs — are terrific. (Bloomsbury, $50)
['The Book of Exploration']
'Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and Design of the Métro'
By MARK OVENDEN
The author admits that the Paris Métro “has been a source of fascination for me since childhood,” and this overstuffed book — packed with vintage maps, photographs and posters — is a train spotter’s delight. “The Paris Métro has more to offer to the student of design than almost any other transport system,” he writes. “Its classic art nouveau entrances, art deco candelabra, white-tiled stations and idiosyncratic maps are almost as recognizable city landmarks as the Tour Eiffel, Arc de Triomphe or the Louvre.” The lovely book will have you scanning the Web for round-trip tickets to Paris, just so you can ride around below the earth. (Penguin, paper, $25)
'Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present'
By GAIL BUCKLAND
I love this book, and not merely for the uniformly excellent and often unexpected photographs Ms. Buckland has chosen to illustrate this love letter to rock’s finest photographers (and performers). I love it, too, for Ms. Buckland’s witty, moving and sometimes acerbic prose. “Rock photos are study guides for hair, clothes, and body language,” she observes. “They are the cheat sheets for modern culture.” About the famous cover image from Bob Dylan’s album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” in which he walked arm in arm with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, she writes, “Wherever that couple was going, I wanted to go.” Whatever Gail Buckland writes, I want to read. (Knopf, $40)
['Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present']

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