There arguably exists only a select wholly gratifying items in this world, and stacks upon stacks of brightly bound and unwieldy coffee table book collections with page after page of illustrations and photographs are most certainly one of them. Few items evoke more inspiration, and almost none make better gifts — for yourself, your best friend, your mom, your lover, your neighbor — you get the picture, literally. Whether it’s a book of stunning photos, a catalog of someone’s lifetime achievements, or even a cookbook with glossy imagery to get your appetite firing, just about any hardcover, visual title can be showcased in one’s home to flip through and rouse. They can tell a lot about a person, too — if you let them. So, in typical Bleu fashion, we’ve created a field guide of sorts with some of the (many newly released) picture books that we have stacked on our tables, dressers, shelves, and awaiting checkout in our Amazon carts. Eyeball satisfaction guaranteed.
Book It
Anti Glossy: Fashion Photography Now
$32, Patrick Remy
Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive
$39, Alex Prager
The World Of Apartmento
$40, Omar Sosa
Mary Ellen Mark: The Book Of Everything
$61, Martin Bell
La Grotta: Ice Creams And Sorbets
$12, Kitty Travers
Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful
$27, Tanisha C. Ford & Deborah Willis
Off The Grid: Houses For Escape
$20, Dominic Bradbury
Delicious Places
$42, Gestalten
Herman Miller: A Way of Living
$72, Amy Auscherman
Shtetl in the Sun
$40, Brett Sokol
Scrawl: An A To Z Of Famous Doodles
$26, Caren Strauss-Schulson
Houseplants and Hot Sauce
$13, Sally Nixon
1000 Record Covers
$18, Michael Ochs
All-American Ads Of The 90s
$33, Steven Heller
Alfred Hitchcock: The Complete Films
$21, Paul Duncan
Interiors: The Greatest Rooms Of The Century
$49, Phaidon Editors
An Atlas Of Rare & Familiar Colour
$35, Kingston Trinder
The 100 Most Jewish Foods: A Highly Debatable List
$15, Alana Newhouse
Weed
$14, Michelle Lhooq
Margaret Kilgallen: That’s Where The Beauty Is
$33, Heidi Zuckerman
Marc Jacobs Illustrated
$41, Grace Coddington & Marc Jacobs
Only Human: Photographs by Martin Parr
$31, Phillip Prodger