By John DeFore

There’s a reason coffee-table books become extremely visible in bookstores this time of year. While many of us balk at buying them for ourselves, over-sized gift books look awfully impressive under the Christmas tree — and will usually linger in the recipient’s memory (and living room) longer than the latest mystery or sci-fi novel. Below, we’ve broken some of the season’s most appealing candidates into broad categories.

For Conventional Coffee Tables

It’s a fantastic time to be a fan (and what art lover isn’t?) of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. While the foot-and-a-half tall, slipcased behemoth Klimt offers one brand of thoroughness, cataloguing all his known paintings and offering detail views of many, the more focused Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections focuses on the collectors whose passions led to the founding of New York’s Neue Gallery. (Look for a diverting section on fashion designers who’ve borrowed from Klimt.) Not specific enough for you? How about a book focused on a single work, Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze and the Controversy over the Freedom of Art?

Moving from brilliant gaudiness to exquisite restraint, a new monograph on Vermeer gathers full-page reproductions of all the master’s known paintings, while Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Collections goes beyond its namesake’s most familiar paintings with little-seen watercolors, sketches, and illuminating work by her peers.

For Eclectic Coffee Tables

The heaviest book on this year’s list, Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures, 1971–2005, which weighs in at over 1,000 Pop-saturated photos by the English duo, is packaged in its own carrying case — a box that could have been torn up and reconfigured to be one of the wall sculptures in Robert Rauschenberg: Cardboards and Related Pieces (Menil Collection), a fascinating chronicle of one of the lesser-known corners of the revolutionary artist’s career.

Two treasure-chest books revolve around more mysterious transformations of ordinary objects: Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination dives into the mind of a man famous for boxed collections of marbles, sand, and throwaway toys, while Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design starts with artists up Cornell’s alley and follows their influence into fashion and product design.

For Armchair Travelers

Two sepia-tinted tomes let readers vicariously return to the age when a trip ’round the globe was de rigueur for the upper crust: Around the World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums digs through the scrapbooks and shoe boxes of the early 20th Century, offering everything from the Pisa tower to pyramids as seen through a fascinated tourist’s eyes; Art And Artifice: Japanese Photographs Of The Meiji Era is slimmer and more specific, peering only at Japanese locations in the Meiji period (1868-1912), when Westerners flooded into the previously isolated country, bringing the photography industry with them. (The Meiji era is also the starting point for Japanese Bamboo Baskets: Meiji, Modern, and Contemporary, a gorgeously detailed chronology of basketry, from beautiful utilitarian objects to modern, sculptural ones.)

Google Earth and GPS may be eroding the market for new maps, but old ones just get more fascinating: Cartographia presents vivid reproductions of some of history’s rarest maps, while Maps: Finding Our Place in the World covers not only historical documents but even the cartography of imaginary places. Taking “imaginary” and running with it is Our Dumb World, a parody of the all-knowing World Atlas by the skewed creators of The Onion newspaper.

For Shutterbugs

They weren’t planned this way, but a pair of photography books neatly divide the technology’s history in the U.S. into two chunks: The Origins of American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839-1885: The Hallmark Photographic Collection at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art looks at the early years, when a wide range of technologies competed to become the photographer’s medium of choice, while The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978 charts nine decades that followed, during which portable consumer cameras made shooting photos an almost universal hobby. On the other hand, Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs shows what happens when advances in technology meet an artist — Ansel Adams, in this case — who pushes their limits to get his distinctive vision onto paper.

For Design Buffs

Though less famous than the aforementioned Gustav Klimt, Viennese designer Koloman Moser possessed an astonishing range of talent, as demonstrated in a monograph that features not only painting and graphic design but textiles, furniture, and glass mosaics. During the decade following his death, France stole a bit of glow from Vienna; the new Moderne: Fashioning the French Interior focuses on the interior design of Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, Eileen Gray and their peers, and overflows with vibrantly colored design drawings of rooms so crisp they make today’s haute design look hokey and vulgar.

If many of these books are too close to your gift budget’s breaking point, the cutely packaged Matchbook: Indian Matchbox Labels is almost as compact and inexpensive as its disposable subject — wasting no pages in its documentation of the wide, colorful range of illustrations found on matchbox labels in India. (Incidentally, publisher Tara Publishing also has a handmade line of journals that put your average Barnes & Noble blank book to shame.)

For Fiction Addicts

Starting in the ’80s, the publishing imprint Black Lizard became synonymous with reissuses of brilliant but forgotten pulp fiction. The new The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age–The ’20s, ’30s & ’40s (Vintage Crime/Blck Lizard Orig) is the opposite of a throwaway pulp rag: a telephone-book-sized compendium of tales by Chandler, Hammett, and far less reputable ink-stained wretches. For dessert, check out Uncovered, where photographer Thomas Allen does hilariously creative things with the titillating cover illustrations on yellowed old paperback mysteries and love stories.

Finally, if all your loved one wants is to lose himself in one huge narrative — or if you feel like making a good-natured joke about his short attention span — there’s always War and Peace, just out in a new translation from the team whose acclaimed Dostoevsky series made them the go-to guys for modern English versions of Russian classics.

Copyright © 2007 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

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