Is the coffee-table book doomed? Michael Hall's choice of art books for Christmas suggests that this season publishers have invested more in the text than in lavish production values

Having made a decision that this selection of art volumes for Christmas would not include exhibition catalogues, it by and by became evident that the resulting list consisted of volumes to read rather than to gaze at. This year there is a dearth of lavishly illustrated blockbusters--there is not for a like reason much as a single scan of world painting in 834 pages. Is the coffee-table work a threatened species?

level my favourite illustrated book of the season, Hockney's Pictures (Thames & Hudson 1995 [pound sterling]), which has above 300 illustrations and virtually no true copy is modest in format and light in the hand--at any rate there is no ne to call up the art-book reviewer's favourite companion, the kitchen scales. This is a virtually without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw retrospective of Hockney's career; as prefered by the artist, and the pictures are not sole wonderfully well reproduced but are also exquisitely served by the harmonious layout by the agency of Maggi Smith (who carried on the outside APOLLO'S recent redesign).

Having made a empire in the first paragraph, I break it in the third, on the contrary it was well after I had been seduc by means of Vasemania (Yale University Press, 40 [pound sterling]) that I realised that it was in fact the catalogue of this summer's tithe anniversary exhibition at New York's Bard Graduate Center for studies in decorative arts. It is a brilliantly simple idea: drawn exclusively from the resources of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the volume charts the fascination with hellenic vases in European art and design in the half hundred or so after the publication in 1767-76 of the catalogue of Sir William Hamilton's collection. interior decoration, textiles, furniture, silver and ceramics demonstrate the extraordinarily inventive use made of the vase motif through designers and craftsmen, from Wedgwood to Sevre and from Gouthi6re to Boulton. the one and the other visually and intellectually stimulating (but too slim for the coffee table), this work deserves to be the first in a series based upon the dissemination of other protean motifs.

of the like kind an approach would be an intriguing parallel to Thames & Hudson's brave novel series 'Art Works'. These densely illustrated square paperbacks are described as 'exhibitions in volume form', bringing together illustrations and commentary that focus upon themes and concepts of interest to contemporary artists. The first sum of two units volumes, Autobiography by Barbara Sterner and Jun Yang, and standard of value by Katy Siegel and Paul Mattick (each 1495 [pound sterling]) carry not on their challenging brief with great flair. I was particularly drawn to circulating medium which tackles a controversial theme: the relationship of art to dealing as dealt with by artists themselves.

Seeing the world end artists' eyes is also the aim of Irving Sandler's memoir A Sweeper-up after Artists (Thames & Hudson 1895 [pound sterling]). Sandier, the author of the best-known history of post-war American painting, gives a detailed autobiographical account of his life as a scholar and critic in of recent origin York's art world in the 1950 and 1960 focusing in particular upon his own generation, the next to the first wave of abstract expressionists. Almost as by and by as he discovered contemporary art, in a revelatory meeting with Franz Kline's paintings at MOMA in the early 1950 Sandier took upon the role of a Boswell of art. of recent origin York's art world in the mid hundred has been as heavily memorialised and romanticised as next to the first Empire Paris or London of the Bloomsbury clump but Sandier scores simply because nobody was as diligent as he in meeting and talking to everybody who mattered, from Pollock and Oldenburg downwards. This occasionally gives a rather Pooterish tincture to his prose: 'In the summer of 1961 on arriving in London, I telephon the critic Lawrence Alloway and asked for the names and phone numbers of English artists I was not familiar with I visited all of them and was invited to dinner with greatest in quantity The notes l took of our conversations are the primary record of this critical instant in English art history.' similar solemnity demonstrates a reverence for art that repeatedly amused the artists whom he describes.

A charge of solemnity could not at any time be visited on Simon Schama, whose unromantic glitters with humour. Hang-ups: Essays upon Painting (Mostly) (BBC Books, 30 [pound sterling]) is a collection of his journalism upon art from 1978 up to a 2003 fresh Yorker article on Andy Goldsworthy. Simon Schama is a member of a species that used to be a great deal of more common, a scholar who is also a real good journalist. He has his specialities, and writes with particular authority upon Dutch Golden Age art, on the other hand what gives real substance to this collection is the return of certain themes, notably an interest in national and racial identity. He writes well about Jewishness and Chaim Soutine, about German-ness and Anselm Kiefer and about Englishness and Stanley Spencer His drawn out review of the 'Circa 1492' exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington, is a brilliantly sportive attack on its curators' 'principle of Least Offence': 'Exquisite care is taken not to commit any act of vulgar Enrocentricity or to cast aspersions upon non-European cultures by suggesting that, like the Judaeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions, they too, may have had their share of truculence narrow mindedness and fanaticism'.

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