An Ode to the Coffee Table Book

Coffee table books are 1% literature and 99% furniture. With apologies to Thomas Edison, this is what I used to think. Too tall, too wide and not too deep, coffee table books first came to my attention when I was no higher than a coffee table myself. The impression was not a favorable one.

For one thing, they tended to weigh more than I did, and like many children with big brothers, I have always equated weight with menace. For another, they didn’t seem to serve any useful purpose. I never saw anybody open one. For a time I thought they belonged to a large and colorful variety of coaster, until that afternoon I rendered an entire copy of Janson’s “History of Art” unreadable with a single glass of Bosco. (Years later, when I discovered the patron saint of editors to be a martyr named John Bosco, it seemed about right.)

By the time I figured out which side of a book to pull open for best results, coffee table books did nothing for me. I wanted paperbacks, softcovers, mass-market editions that fit into my teen-age hands as naturally as baseball cards had a few seasons before. Sure, some coffee table books around our house were rumored to have pictures of naked ladies in them, but what good was a naked lady you had to hold with both hands?

College was, in this and other respects, an education. It made me smart, and, without their even enrolling, my family stupid. Those same unbudgeable coffee table books back home--years of California sunlight already turning the wood beneath them slowly to parquet--now seemed the quintessence of tack. Besides, I owned no coffee table, drank little coffee. Card table books, steamer trunk books, these I could relate to. What did I care for coffee table books when I finally had the real books, albeit with more underscoring through them than a Dimitri Tiomkin soundtrack? My reservations about the coffee table book were roughly fourfold:

1-- They’re goofy . Honestly, how seriously can you take a book like, to pick (on) one arbitrarily, “Golf Resorts of the World”? Even if it is “sumptuously illustrated”? Even if the text is “wonderfully evocative”? Even if a “renowned golf-course photographer” did take all the “full-color” pictures? As opposed to what, part-color pictures? “Sorry, can’t afford any red, but they’re golf courses, who’ll miss it?” Goofy. Goofy, goofy.

2-- They cost too much . How much is too much? For “Classic Porsches: Generations of Genius,” tax is too much. $45 for “The Bakelite Jewelry Book” is too much. As a rule, if a thing costs less than a book about it, buy the thing. As another rule, every time you buy a book whose price doesn’t end with 95 cents, make a donation of equal value to your local library.

3-- They rot . They do. Not really, of course. Rotting can take days. They thaw, is more like it. The average coffee table book remains in mint condition about as long as the average mint. There are precautions, of course. You can remove easily mashed and torn dust jackets and put them aside for later crushing. Face it, most coffee table book jackets have the approximate life expectancy of californium. Why do you think bookstores keep display copies? If browsing ruins them, what do you think reading will do?

4-- They are, ultimately, anti-verbal . So is most of society, of course, but a book ought to be different somehow. It shouldn’t get to look like a book if it’s not going to be one. The late 20th Century is going to be a war between words and images, and any writer who collaborates on a picture book is just that, a collaborator.

And yet, who am I fooling? Can I really pretend for one moment longer that there is anything in the world I would rather see distending my Yuletide wind sock?

I would love to stand fast in my rejection of coffee table books as silly, overpriced, fragile, logo-phobic tchotchkes, but heaven help me, I can’t get enough of them. Actually, I can’t get any of them until the January markdowns come, but that won’t stop me wishing.

So what if coffee table books put the “sump” back into “sumptuous”? All I see are their straight spines gleaming on the topmost shelves of my bookcases--the only shelves that enable them to stand up straight. How their glossy pages bid my fingertips skate across them, like stocking feet over fresh-oiled hardwood! How precipitously they chute out from their pizza-box cartons, soon to lurch open for the first time with delicious hesitation!

It isn’t only to coffee table books that the years are cruel. Maturity makes hypocrites of us all. The same books I once disdained, now I covet. Time was, I would answer “Never trust anyone over 30” with a hearty amen. Now I ask feebly: “Inclusive?”

Worst of all, I now have my own idea for the perfect coffee table book. “The Illustrated History of the Coffee Table Book,” I call it. It would trace the storied saga of the picture book from its earliest antecedents among breathtaking medieval illuminated manuscripts, on up to the stunning, laser-printed, computer-typeset marvels of today. Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of rare photographs in full color, this coffee table book would make a welcome and eye-catching addition to any home.

Except mine. I don’t have anything to put it on.