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