Coffee Table Books and What They Do

These heavy tomes are not just another pretty face

Oversized, hardbound coffee table books. Everyone knows what they are and most people consider them useful for nothing more than to stack up and stand on when the stepladder isn’t tall enough.

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism is a compilation of essays and art from important contributors to the movement like Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, and Augusta Savage. This creative ground swell that started in upper Manhattan actually defined modernism around the world. Published by The Metropolitan Museum and Yale University Press

I beg to differ. To me, a good coffee table book is like having a little piece of an art museum in your home. What you put on your coffee table is an immediate identifier of who you are and where your interests lie.

And yet, when I walked around my house looking for good examples, I realized that my oversized hardbound books made a rather haphazard representation of my cultural interior. Now I am committed to a thorough review of my own coffee table books and how I can manage them better by paying attention to the exciting books already out there … and what’s coming next.

My living room shelf holds a stack of nice-looking books but they aren’t really of the coffee table variety. All they tell you is that I was an English major and my English teacher mother gave me nicely bound books every Christmas.

Living with books involves difficult choices. They accumulate, gather dust, and are seldom read more than once (if at all). They are heavy and take up a lot of space. Next time you move or decide to clean out your storage, you will look at those boxes labeled “books” with deep, exhausted loathing.

I am no expert here, but I’ve thought a lot about the responsibility and contradictions of book possession. To become a better judge of this one particular genre, I’ve signed up to become an official reviewer. Both you and I will benefit from a more informed discussion in the future.

Coffee table books are doing their job when they take you to places you never thought you’d go. This extremely weird book, titled A Vast Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur, explores the five prevailing multiverse theories, one which involves a quilt. Edited by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, screenwriters of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, which won seven Oscars in 2023.

For now, I will state the general reasons that they are important. First, the beauty of coffee table books is that they are beautiful themselves. Trust me when I say that in traditional publishing, cover design takes weeks and weeks of meetings and concepting. The final cover design is a HUGE undertaking. Then you have 150-200 interior pages to be laid out with photographs, illustrations, and well-designed text. The best coffee table books represent years of research and toil from the brightest minds around us.

All we have to do, then, is choose the ones that catch our eye or pique our curiosity. All this work done so that your selected book can nourish your mind, stir your imagination, and add a bit of that coveted dark academia vibe to your furnishings. They are also valuable conversation pieces when friends and family come over. If you get a good one for Christmas, put it out and enjoy the interest it evokes.

The Origins of the Coffee Table Book

The modern coffee table book was born, unlikely enough, in The Sierra Club. California’s very own David Brower, first executive director of the renowned environmental club and one of the century’s greatest advocates for protecting and conserving the planet, had the idea as a consumer-friendly way to draw attention to conservation priorities.

In the late 1950s, he promoted the idea of a lush, photo-heavy book titled This Is the American Earth. The book was developed after a major exhibit in 1955 at the Yosemite Conservation Heritage Center of the same name.

This Is the American Earth was published in 1960, with photographs by Ansel Adams and copy by Nancy Newhall. It was the coffee table that literally started the modern environmental movement.

I am excited to plumb my combined interests in books and small space design in a new way. Not all of us can spend time evaluating important books, so I will attempt to be your guide.

Behind every good coffee table book published is a series of decisions that determine what is important from the editors’ perspective—and of course for every book accepted, thousands more with equal promise don’t see the light of day. Fortunately there are now other ways to publish, and hopefully we can explore that world in due time.

These books, resulting from an extraordinarily arduous process, serve to elevate our society and open our gaze to that moment in time. Similarly, the art books of the past remind us of movements started, minds opened, and opinions changed by the insistence of what is on their pages.

Yes, these heavy books weigh much more than what we credit them for. Stand upon them if you must, but give them the attention and respect they are due.