Mercantile / The Big Books
The Big Books
The great coffee-table books, kept as objects you live with rather than books you read. Art and photography, interiors and gardens, fashion and architecture, travel and the museum catalogs.
Phaidon Carlo Scarpa
The architect's architect, who obsessed over a single joint for months. Detail as devotion.
$40
Thames & Hudson Geoffrey Bawa: Architecture for the Senses
Tropical modernism from Sri Lanka, indoors and outdoors dissolved into each other. The great secret of the century.
$90
Phaidon Le Corbusier: Le Grand
The vast scrapbook of the century's most argued-about architect. Sketches, letters, buildings, ego.
$200
Dia / Yale Agnes Martin
Pale grids drawn by hand, the calmest radical in American art. You sit with it, you do not look at it.
$65
Phaidon Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists
Phaidon's pocket collection of artists in their own words, the studio wisdom and the one-liners.
$25
Phaidon Cat
Phaidon's survey of the cat across art, history, and couture, two hundred images set in playful pairs. Herbert consulted.
$40
David Zwirner Books Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings
A lifetime of the same few bottles, and never the same painting twice. Silence you can hang.
$75
Guggenheim Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future
The Swedish mystic who painted abstraction before the men did, and told no one. The book everyone discovered late.
$65
Phaidon Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now
Phaidon's A to Z of Latin American art, more than three hundred artists from 1785 to now.
$80
Metropolitan Museum of Art Charles James: Beyond Fashion
The American who made dresses like architecture and died broke. The couturier other couturiers worshipped.
$50
Nicola Erni & Birgit Filzmaier Mix & Match: Fashion Photography Meets Contemporary Art
Fashion photography set beside contemporary art, from the Nicola Erni collection.
$80
Thames & Hudson Derek Jarman's Garden
A shingle garden on a bleak Kent coast, made by a dying filmmaker. Small, fierce, unforgettable.
$40
Phaidon Garden: Exploring the Horticultural World
Phaidon's visual history of the garden, ancient horticulture to the contemporary, three hundred images side by side.
$60
Thames & Hudson The Land Gardeners: Cut Flowers
Two women, a walled English garden, and the flowers everyone now wants. Soil as the real subject.
$50
Rizzoli Umberto Pasti: Eden Revisited
A Tangier garden built to save the plants a city was bulldozing. Obsessive, romantic, quietly radical.
$55
Michael James Gardner & Boris Vervoordt Axel Vervoordt: Portraits of Interiors
The patron saint of quiet, expensive rooms. Wabi as a way of living, not a look.
$65
Rizzoli Studio KO
The architects behind the Yves Saint Laurent museum in Marrakech. Raw, warm, and exact.
$75
Metropolitan Museum of Art Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination
The catalog for the most visited show in the Met's history. Fashion and faith, gold on gold.
$65
Steidl Guy Bourdin: A Message for You
The most dangerous images fashion ever ran. Bourdin sold shoes and made you uneasy for life.
$150
Steidl Saul Leiter: Early Color
Rain on glass, a red umbrella, New York seen sideways. The photographer who stayed unknown on purpose.
$80
Taschen Sebastiao Salgado: Genesis
Eight years, thirty journeys, the planet before us. A black and white love letter to the untouched world.
$130