Backlisted - Coffee Table Books

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

This fully illustrated, lavishly produced episode of Backlisted represents the last word in coffee table books. Join John, Andy and Nicky as we dip into the origin, design and continuing appeal of specialist hardcover publishing, via some of our favourite cookery books, exhibition catalogues and sumptuous volumes simply too beautiful to leave on the shelf. As you will hear, we loved making this show, which is as deep as it is long. And remember: a coffee table book is for life, not just for Christmas.  To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get two extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today's show is a departure in format for us because we're here not to discuss a single book, a single author, even a single genre. We're here to dust off a whole category of publishing, one that defines itself not by what the books are about but where they're destined to end up The Coffee Table

I'm John Mitchinson, publisher unbound where people crowdfund the coffee table books they really want to look at And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously a volume still not available in a lavish illustrated anniversary edition. Yet. Yeah, got to monetize that intellectual property somehow. And joining us for our discussion today is our producer, Nikki Birch, who claims, well, we had a really fun discussion with her

where she pointed out that she was uncertain whether she owned many coffee table books and did not indeed own a coffee table. True to form. I'm playing my role. No, no, no, no, no. Shame, shame, shame. I have managed to find one or two,

which I can dig out from the big bookshelves. John, do you want to just say a little bit about why we decided to make this show? Because it sort of came together unexpectedly. We're going to say that. Go on. Why did we decide we needed to do this? There's always a challenge, isn't there, in talking about stuff which is primarily visual in a non-visual medium.

And as listeners will know, we relish such a challenge. I think it came out of a discussion that we were having when I was literally in a conversation at work that afternoon about the apparent demise or the certain shrinking of the large coffee table format book. Do you mean shrinking like shrinkflation, like they're getting smaller or that there's less of them? Well, I think we're going to have to discuss that horrible word I've never heard before, shrinkflation.

But the idea, I think there is a sense in which the format is definitely morphing into something different. is something different i would like to say yeah uh in if batlisted you know batlisted exists in defiance of supposedly the uh decline in reading the decline of the book the decline of literary culture yeah okay so for me i just i know john and i and nikki as well all feel this i love beautiful objects indeed and coffee table books are beautiful objects that are books uh we'll all feel this, I love beautiful objects. Indeed. And coffee table books are beautiful objects that are books. We'll try and expand on that definition a little bit. But I wish I had hundreds and hundreds of these things. I love them. I wish I had enough coffee tables on which to display a series

of coffee table books. I really, really love them. No guest on Backlisted has ever ever as far as i can recall selected a coffee table book and i don't expect one i don't expect one ever will the nearest we've come to has got to be fungus the bogeyman yes in fact nicky where you brought to the table the fungus pop-up book which is probably even closer to that's right so so we are thrilled to be talking about this for the next hour or so. What I don't quite understand is what makes a coffee table book a coffee table book? Beyond just being big, is that it?

Yes, a large format publication is probably correct, isn't it, John? I think we go for a large format. I think, let's be honest, hardback is important. Yes, it's probably a hardcover, not a paperback. Does it have to have pictures? It has to have pictures, I think. I do think it does have to have pictures. Also, I'll add a further qualification.

It has to be reassuringly expensive. Very expensive and heavy. Not necessarily very expensive, but it has to be more expensive than the average book. Which one of us is a publisher at this table? Does it have to be of a suitable weight that every time you move house, you think, should I be getting rid of this book? Do I read it enough?

Well, let me tell you, I had an experience of exactly that. I went to visit my stepmother and she has been ruthlessly reducing the books that she owns since my father's death last year. And while I thought I'd kind of got rid of the worst of it, there were two illustrated books, coffee table books that she had decided they were too big and too heavy and they were absolutely they were enormously large format and enormously heavy incredibly beautiful one was a book on venice and the other was a kind of a uffizi gallery the art of florence they're going to be with me now for the rest of your life forcing me to answer that question that you have just posed Nikki am I really going to move them am I going to and I'm going to put them anywhere I haven't

even figured out where to put them at the moment there's no shelf big enough I was a child during the 1970s and so my definition of a coffee table book is partly based on the two books I remember being in our house and every house that we visited for friends of my parents. What were they? Everyone seemed to own copies of Alistair Cook's America. If you're a certain age, you will see that book in your mind's eye and also something like the Reader's Digest World Atlas of Cheeses. That's what I remember. So for instance, I would say a coffee table book is likely to be

a large format illustrated reference book, right? Certainly a gift book, something that you might spend a bit more money on because it was a present or a special time of year. John, what other kinds of book might be published in a coffee table format? Great monographs by great photographers. I'm thinking of some of those amazing books, Irving Penn. Yeah. Don McCullen. Yeah.

So art books in general, we would say. Art, fashion, architecture. And then in the 60s, you start to get illustrated cookbooks. Robert Carrier, in particular, Great Dishes of the World, is a really important historical book in the development. Yes. The book that blows everything open wide is Paul Hamlin, great publisher, publishes Margaret Patton's

Everyday Cookbook in Colour. And invents… In colour. Colour reproduction, very important. Yes, I can agree. Invents the kind of modern cookbook which is now… I think cookbooks are no longer… People probably don't think of them as coffee table books anymore.

But at the time, the idea of having something large format and colour with recipes in was pretty mind-blowing. I would suggest that the modern cookbook is indeed a coffee table book, which people need to feel could be used as an instruction manual if they could ever be bothered to do so. until they do it looks awfully nice on the kitchen shelf or indeed the coffee table i'd like to give a couple more examples of what i think are coffee table books i think there's a certain kind of deluxe um children's yeah hardback book you know fundamentally anything that's that's a treasury, something that is nice to furnish. Books do furnish a room, as we said on a previous episode.

It's nice to be in the nursery. Maybe your child doesn't have a coffee table yet, but if they did, it might have a beautiful mother goose upon it. It's more something that you give to your child in the hope they may be looking at it because it's beautiful, but in actual fact they're probably not pouring over the coffee table book but you at the same time to have that as a presence and that we're going to keep the book as objects with the coffee table book is terribly important and i think i think you're right because there's also the learning aspect is that you give to your child the atlas the earth and the

air you remember those ones oh yeah yeah and so you sort of say here you go and learn from this please okay so but there's one more category that i think is very important and kind of overlaps with um books john has published uh but also books that we are all interested in. It seems to me that the coffee table book is also the place that if there's a niche interest and listeners. Welcome home. Wait till we get on to the actual books we're going to talk about. we're going to talk about but if there's a niche interest that appeals to a small number of people who will pay a premium price for something beautiful associated with their enthusiasm yeah that is the ultimate coffee table book yeah right what you're buying is a affirmation

of your love of whatever weird little subject it is that you have decided to devote your passion to, which you know is shared only by a select number of people. And that's got to be worth a three-figure sum. That's my guess. But also on subscription, I'm going to talk about a book later on, and John, you must know this model, Also on subscription, I'm going to talk about a book later on, and John, you must know this model, where the 500 people who might be terribly enthusiastic about NASA, say,

can fund the production of an absolutely beautiful and expensive book containing all NASA's designs in a particular era. There you go. There's a very good example of it, right? So what is the general market for that? Limited. What is the specialist market? Very, very enthusiastic. So that's what we're talking about.

In a nutshell, it's large format illustrated books which speak of the enthusiasm and expertise of both their writers, their authors, and their readers. We've each picked some books, haven't we? We have. My first choice of book is, it's going to be one of those books that some people, indeed, I've already had this said to me earlier today, is that really a coffee table book?

Controversy. I'm backlisted. It is absolutely a coffee table book. It is the Reader's Digest Book of Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. I'm not going to do this every time, but this has got one of the most, and I hate the word iconic, but this is genuine. You're going to both use the I word and hold the book up on you. This is genuinely, this book terrified a whole generation of people.

Oh, that one. Oh, yes. If you want to ask about where the boom in folk horror comes from, this book came out in 1973 it is an it's there are many things about this book okay please give us the full title i will give you the full time publisher there is no author it is because i'll tell you why in a moment it's the readers digest at their considerable early 70s best it is folklore Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, published in 1973. It's a massive 550-page book.

It is divided into three parts. The first part is called The Law of Britain, L-O-R-E, with brilliant illustrated essays about the mysterious world of nature, life, love and work, gods, ghosts and witches. Part two, which is most of the book, is called The Romance of Britain, a regional guide, a gazetteer, A to Z, of Britain's folklore. And then part three is People of Myth, a gallery of heroes, saints and scoundrels. The thing that sets this book apart is the astonishing collection

of contributors and artists, right? You've got Russell Ash, Geoffrey Ash, Catherine Briggs, the great folklorist. You've got people, if you're in the world of folklore, you will recognise Venetia Newell. folklore you will recognize venetian you'll you will recognize um a a whole set of kind of people who wrote both academics but also popular writers like jeffrey ash you've got astonishing illustrators like charles keeping and robin jake and and great photographers as well The book opens with a brilliant, not only is it a brilliant essay about why folklore matters, there's actual ghost story in it about an academic who,

working at the British Museum, who receives a couple of heads from a fort on Hadrian's Wall, carved Celtic heads, and then has nightmares and her daughter is haunted with strange spectral kind of shapes so you're immediate this is this is a book that on that stimulates absolutely every possible sense it's practical wow it's kind of it's it's a book thatb. It's a book that I will never forget. It's a book that I go back to regularly. I don't think anything that has ever been done has come close to it in terms of pulling material, visual and research. Give us the title again, John.

It's called Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain Reader's Digest. I would say everybody who follows Stone Club, everybody who follows Weird Walks, every Susan Cooper, every Alan Garner reader, anybody who's ever watched Blood on Satan's Claw, The Wicker Man. That's their Bible. This is the Bible, isn't it?

This is, it is kind of the ur-text. Right. Can you tell why we wanted to make this show? Can you feel the energy in the room rising immediately? It's immaculately designed. It's brilliantly written. As I say, it's kind of practically useful. I've got a question then about that.

You were challenged on whether or not it is a coffee table book. I would say it passes the test for a coffee table book insofar as it's unlikely, though not impossible, unlikely you would read it from cover to cover, forward to back. Absolutely. You would be more likely to open it, browse it, dip into it, right? Completely.

That seems to me to be one of the characteristics of a coffee table. And it's super niche in the way that you said, Andy. Yeah, absolutely. And it positions you as a type of person who's into folklore. But let me ask you, John, do you know how much it cost when it was published? Do we know? I don't know how much it cost. I have a feeling they're about £20, you know,

which at the time was quite a lot of money. Yes, right. Okay. So certainly a gift book, almost certainly a coffee table book with all due respect to you. I checked this morning. This is going for £100 now. Is it?

Yeah. I mean, and the rest. I mean, you can buy it if you want a first edition. All right. Andy, have you got one? So John has offered us a profane coffee table book, and it's up to me, therefore, in the interest of balance, to provide a sacred one.

Oh, nice. Oh, beautiful. I have a copy here of a book that was published in 1963 by the photographer, Hank Snoke and text by the architect, Sir Basil Spence. And it's called out of the ashes, a progress in pictures through Coventry cathedral.

And the copy that I have here, the price has been cut out. It was given as a gift. I can't tell you what it costs. Apologies. But it says, to Brenda and Clifford, fond love from Phyllis and John, Christmas 1963. So 60 years ago, this was given as a Christmas present, published presumably because of, this is a strange thing to say, Coventry Cathedral mania, which was a thing in the early 1960s.

Coventry Cathedral, for our listeners at home and abroad who aren't aware, was the first cathedral to be consecrated and built in the wake of the Second World War. first cathedral to be consecrated and built in the wake of the Second World War, and in Coventry, because Coventry suffered terrible bombing by the Nazis. And so the idea of building something which was a temple to both hope and Christianity, hope and Christianity and the best of British 20th century design was the motivation for creating Coventry Cathedral. And the opening ceremony in the early 1960s was a major event. Basil Spence published a book about building the cathedral called

Phoenix in Coventry. And clearly that was enough of a success that they then published this book of photographs and his handwritten notes on what each part of the cathedral means. And I can tell you as somebody who is, my passion for Coventry Cathedral knows few bounds. And I didn't know this book existed until about a year ago when I found a copy in the library. It is, again, the photographs are beautiful. It's a large format hardback. But what it offers you in an era when such things were not possible, when even travel was more challenging,

is the opportunity to travel through the cathedral, through its artworks, through its purpose, through its beauty, with the man who conceived it, built it, and had written about it. And I believe that this book, Out of the Ashes, was a bestseller. Amazing. Right? In other words, people wanted a souvenir. People also felt that the cathedral was an achievement worth commemorating.

And that meant there was a market and an audience, which me, Andy Miller, at 60 years' distance, feels almost humble with gratitude about how important and beautiful this book is. It's the thing I was talking about earlier. If you have a passion for a subject and somebody has gone to the time, effort, and trouble of commemorating it between hardcovers

in an appropriate manner, which allows you to share their passion, their respect for whatever it might be, why would you not want to buy that and give it to friends as a Christmas present in 1963? I mean, it's just, it's, I'm, the thing is, I love this show. I love this show because it's so hard to talk about this book

without going, look at it. Look at it. You can look at it. Look at it. You can look at it. Look at it. Look at it. Anyway, it's called Out of the Ashes, A Progress in Pictures Through Coventry Cathedral. Actually, you touch on something that's very, I think, really important about this genre, which is it does have a relationship to religious devotion.

does have a relationship to religious devotion and the word iconic in its proper meaning, which is this idea that if we see a film of Coventry Cathedral, we consume that in time, we watch it, and then it goes away again. If we go to Coffin Tree Cathedral, we fill ourselves up with memory, we fill ourselves up with sensual recollection, we witness that the ability to, in, as it were, the comfort of our own homes, to revisit and to explore and to go back and to deepen and enrich that experience. That is something the coffee table book, much maligned by some people, and I'll go on to why in a moment. That's something that they seem to be able to do uniquely. They're doing something very different from other books. I have an example of that.

We've discussed on our patron-funded sister show, Locklisted, We've discussed on our patron-funded sister show, Locklisted, we discussed a few years back the fabulous Peter Jackson film Get Back series, correct? We did. And then, lo and behold, that Christmas, I get a present from one Andy Miller of Get Back the coffee table book. Right? True. That guy. And no, but it does just that because then I can look at it and be reminded about how, what amazing, you know, this amazing

TV series, as well as everything that happened, you know, in the making of Get Back. But, but I, so I do think you're right. It's, it's, it's making you remember a thing that you really enjoyed and you can sort of flick through it and enjoy it without having to fully engage in it, right? John used the word iconic in its true sense and I used the word souvenir in its true sense from the French to remember. You know, it's a place,

the coffee table book is a place you can go effectively and to contemplate this thing that either provokes memories or is an image of beauty or, you know, we're getting carried away here, aren't we? Nicky, on our Patreon, on the backlisted Patreon, we asked subscribers to nominate their favorite coffee table books i wonder it might be nice to hear a few of those now oh my god we had so many responses so thank you yeah thank you for responding it was lovely and lots of people saying how important they were and

how lovely had a nice message from veronica steinberg who says coffee table books actually had a major impact on her life which is lovely my grandmother she says always had big art books on her coffee table and we would look at them together while having tea our two favorites were Monet by Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge published by Abrams in 1983 and the art of Emily Carr by Doris Shadbolt published in 1979 the coffee table books and my grandmother fostered my love of art and because of them I studied art history. And now I'm an archivist and it's a field I wouldn't have got into

if art history hadn't introduced me to the job of field museum archives. She says, I don't have a coffee table currently, but I still love coffee table books. There you go. Well, there you go. That's wonderful. Brilliant. Okay, but also I believe we talked about this in the past.

When there's a major exhibition in London or Manchester or Glasgow or wherever, or New York, many people will not be able to attend that exhibition, but they can access the catalogue, the coffee table book. And I've talked in the past, I remember, about what a pleasure it is to actually read one of those. You love those. But,

but, but they, they serve the function. Our, our, our friend there was talking about, and John was talking about is that they, they are a place you can go.

If you want to contemplate the work of a particular artist or whoever and you don't have airfare to MoMA you can you can still look at a beautifully reproduced book yeah a lot of people have said that Michelle Metcalf she said the same thing I'm very impulsive procurer of museum published coffee table books from special exhibitions. I have photography books, books on tattoos and fashion. And my favorite, which I'd love to be able to lay out on a nice coffee table book, but my cat likes to chew books, horror, is Raining Men, R-E-I-G-N, Raining Men, Fashion in Menswear, 1715 to 2015. It was a special fashion exhibition at LACMA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and probably cost me about 65 bucks back in 2016. But well worth it because the photographs are gorgeous and takes me right back to being able to see the real clothing in person.

So exactly that. People really enjoy having these mementos and particularly where, you know, from these art exhibitions and from these very beautiful things that they can have a look at in the beauty of their own home. I've got the exhibition catalogue on the shelf over there that accompanied the Mary Quant retrospective at the V&A a few years ago. Totally wonderful. There's also one more thing I want to just say from the patrons. Simon Oliver points out something I think which we haven't yet mentioned,

but is really crucial to all of coffee table book discussions. He says he has quite a few so-called coffee table books. Which one is casually lying on the coffee table depends on who the visitors are. And how shallow am I? Well, Simon, we are coming on to that very that very topic in a moment john's going to give us a a brief history of the coffee table book but because this is backlisting we believe in being thorough first i'm going to give you a brief history of the coffee table because in fact the coffee table book is with us sort of as a function of the coffee table coffee tables in a nutshell

are derived from occasional tables that would be used in well-to-do parlors or living rooms in the 1700s and as this is true i love this fact as the backs of settees fashion dictated that they got lower and lower, it was impractical to have very tall tables to one side of your settee. So instead, a fashion developed for low tables in front of the settee on which you would take your tea. They weren't known as coffee tables. They were known as tea tables. Now that I can get behind. Okay, right, yeah. So that becomes a kind of staple of the Victorian parlour.

But once you get into the early 20th century, the idea of a table in the middle of the room plus changing fashions in what people drank in their living rooms and their sitting rooms meant that a tea table becomes a coffee table and furthermore the coffee table becomes one of the main vehicles of display in any living space. Therefore, what do you choose to put on your display table to remind not just other people, but yourself of your uniqueness, your identity? It might well be a book. And therefore, these objects that we love so much are the direct product of historical changes in living environment, from occasional table to tea table to coffee table, or what's known in the States as a cocktail table, indeed. So John, when does the coffee table book start adorning the coffee table in earnest?

A couple of things. One is post-war printing technology begins to improve. Colour printing technology begins to improve. And there are some pioneers, Albert Skira in Switzerland, Harry Abrams in America. There are some great French publishers, Édition Masno, Édition Tisnay. And those tend to be reproductions of art and photography. And they're beginning to produce them in large folio editions,

tipped-in colour plates. So tipped-in is where you print a print and then you actually stick it into the book. But it's really in the 60s that things start to really get jazzed up. In the early 60s, a visionary guy called David Brower is running a thing called the Sierra Club, which is an environmental kind of what we would now call it almost like an NGO, an organization that's pressing for environmental change. And he comes up with the idea of large format books that combine amazing nature photography.

And one of his first books is a book called The American Earth with photographs by Ansel Adams, text by Nancy Newhall, published in 1960. He calls the series the exhibit format series. And not only does it become massively successful very quickly, it does something that he thinks that other books couldn't quite do. So a couple of things that he says, they were big books, they were heavy, they were expensive. We need a page size big enough to carry a given image's dynamic the eye this is crucial must be required to move about within the boundaries of the image not encompass it all at one glance so that was pretty revolutionary at the time the books were produced with exacting standards printed on expensive paper designed with exceptional care the photographs exceeded the reproduction quality found in other books and magazines.

Even the typography required a matching elegance. Their books carried a high price tag and were clearly aimed at an affluent audience, consumers who desired, in Brouwer's words, a prestige item, something they could display in their homes. So he basically said, that's what we need. In the age of conformity. We're going to market the reality of wilderness captured by the camera presented in the elegant style of a coffee table book. That was his great vision.

Okay, beautiful, beautiful. Listen, we're going to take a quick break now, but when we come back, you know, coffee table books are published on all manner of subjects, all artists and nature, photography, architecture. But when we come back, we're going to hear a clip which will perhaps instruct us as to the ultimate coffee table book. See you in a moment. Welcome back.

The ultimate coffee table book, as recommended by a number of our patrons, has to be one created by Kramer. From Seinfeld? Yeah. Okay, go on. Can I bring out our next guest now? Please, please. Young guy, he's got a new book coming out,

and it's about, and this is the best part. I love this. It's a coffee table book about coffee tables. Yeah. Is that clever? Yeah. I think that is so clever. Great.

So, coffee table book about coffee tables. Yeah. Have you always had an interest in coffee tables? Because, really, I love coffee tables. And I thought I was the only one. See, the beauty of my book is, if you don't have a coffee table, it turns into a coffee table. Is that fabulous? Look at this.

Is that fabulous? and what you can't see in that clip is that the legs come out at the bottom of the book to become a coffee table excellent lovely to hear this episode being parodied 30 years ago as well that's good thanks everyone on the patreon who suggested uh who suggested that such a good uh call so why don't we talk a bit about our second choice of book nikki nikki you've um you you you're bringing something exotic to the table to the coffee table what have you got yeah well i've got a book published in 1976 called assassination in our time um by sandy lesberg um And I thought you'd like this. It's a book. I'll read the blurb, I think.

Oh, nice. Some of the blurb. It's quite long. For the first time in one authoritative volume, here is the definitive textual and pictorial study of the major assassinations of the 20th century. The untimely deaths of these 20 historical men, let's just add that in for my own usage there,

is 20 historical figures literally changed the course of history, if not of the world, then certainly within their own realms of influence. A lively and stimulating text, together with over 300 photographs, offer a unique and telling insight into the life and times of these individuals, the dramatic events of their actual assassination and the assassins who, acting alone or in conspiracy, would dare to affect political change through violence. Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas. Sandy Lesberg has got together, this is everyone from, I mean, you could probably guess, but it's got Archduke Francis Ferdinand, it's could probably guess but it's got um uh archduke francis ferdinand it's got malcolm x it's got kennedy it's got martin lindsay king it's got trotsky it's got king alexander the first of yugoslavia it's got um his majesty faisal bin abdulaziz right yeah it's got che guevara but what it's crucially got is lots of pictures of them alive and then dead you know so it's like no holds barred yeah a lot of dead bodies but not the sort of moat you don't get the

sort of the moment they've been assassinated but you do get body shots um and in each in each at the beginning of each they have a picture of the person you know for example I'm going to give you one of them Patrice Lumumba there's a picture of patrice lemumba and it has born july the 2nd 1925 kazai province belgian congo then it says died january the 17th etc and it says what he's famous for and then it has the assassins his name of his assassins and or in these case they were never apprehended and who they were so each one is like the assassin story is part of the text and the pictures so you see lee harvey oswald so you see you know what i mean so it's about it's not just about the person who was killed it's about their

life and then the person who killed them john's talked about folklore and he has a huge passion for folklore i've talked about Coventry Cathedral. I'm fascinated by Coventry Cathedral. Nicky, how come you own a copy of a book about assassinations? Well, I have to say, this is my husband's book. I don't have a coffee table, remember, but I've seen this on our shelf for 20 years. You've never looked at it? No, I have looked at it.

And I just thought this is a really great one to bring to it and but i wanted to find out a little bit more about the author sandy lesberg right he has published um he's published like 20 coffee table books he's done this is tons and tons of them right happens he's done the canals of amsterdam 17th century art but also he's done one called the coffee houses palaces of vienna so you know oh this guy is that what's he called sandy lesberg and if you want to get neville shoot he is he is if you want to buy the assassination um it is available right now for 70p on Amazon. So, you know, guys, you too can find out. It is good.

It's a great book. That is significantly cheaper than either of the books we've talked about so far as well. Good. Well, this is the other thing that happens. Talking about the economics, Sandy Lesberg, in a way, he will stand in for the the the the kind of heroes of the the explosion in the 60s 70s 80s of um of coffee table books because that basically paul hamlin george weidenfeld a whole generation of publishers who arrived in this country from refugees from from

nazi germany completely revolutionised English publishing. I think it's George Feinfeld who more or less founds the Frankfurt Book Fair after the war. What people realised was, what publishers realised was, that you could produce books, because they were visual, that you could sell in every market in the world. I see. Okay, so what you were able to do, and it's called co-edition,

you basically have minimal text. It's called a black plate change. You make sure that text is printed in black so there's no design. One publisher in this country, it used to be in this country, now they would be printed in the Far East or in Eastern Europe, can print an edition for all the co-edition partners across the world and make incalculably large sums of money. It was a brilliant way of making money.

You wonder why every second-hand bookshop is full of books on bridges of the world, gardens of the world, markets of the world. Fascinating. Things of the world that appeal the world things of the world right that appeals to everyone i see so it explodes in the late 60s and becomes even more insane in the 70s i was thinking it's saying it's like those shampoo adverts where you don't really see someone's mouth moving because you know they're being the the uh the voiceover is in different different languages exactly right that is exactly right it can be run in 20 countries simultaneously, yeah.

Can I just talk about my second choice of book quickly? So back on episode 112 of Batlisted, when we were still doing what we've been reading this week, a feature which you can now find on Locklisted rather than in the main show, I talked about a book that I loved then a feature which you can now find on Locklisted rather than in the main show. I talked about a book that I loved then and absolutely love now called John Piper's Brighton Aquatins. The very definition of a coffee table book, a large, beautiful, illustrated book.

I've already talked about Coventry Cathedral. John Piper, of course, contributed the baptistry window in Coventry Cathedral. Anyway, just before the Second World War, he published a book called Brighton Acquitance, which is his pictures of specific places in Brighton, in Sussex in the UK, accompanied by text. And a small publisher called mainstone press had brought it back into print for the first time since the 1930s and created a book about the publication of that book anyway one of their more recent publications is a trilogy of books that were originally published in the 1920s in France, which were called boutiques. And Mainstone had republished Eric Revilleus' book High Street to great success.

Well, this is the French equivalent of High Street by Revilleus. And there are three of these books. I'm just going to talk about this one. And I'm going to read from the forward. Imagine for a moment that the literary greats of 1920s Paris were not in fact writers, but shopkeepers. What kind of shop would Collette, author of La Vagabonde, open? And how about Max Jacob, André Gide or Marcel Proust? This is the delightful premise of the 1925 book Prochainement Ouverture de 62 Boutiques Littéraires,

a visual jeu d'esprit conceived by illustrator Henri Goulac and writer Pierre Macaulay in their book 62 authors from the Parisian literary scene are reimagined standing in the doorway of their own shop each of which is named after a play on the author's most famous or latest work now I was going to refer to this as a republication, but it isn't, because it's taken 100 years for it to appear in an English edition. So the preface to this is translated into English by our friend Sean Whiteside from the original edition, and Mainstone commissioned an essay from the writer Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneurs,

to accompany it as well. The illustrations are indescribably beautiful. The text is terribly witty. You're buying something that signals your commitment to literature and design and book production and art. If I went round somebody's house and they had a copy of Boutique Littéraire sitting on the table, I would marry them.

But this is still in print. It's an expensive book, I'm not going to lie, but it's so beautiful and so in tune with the sensibilities and enthusiasms of a particular sort of person that when you buy it, you feel you are joining a member of a fairly select club of fellow enthusiasts. of fellow enthusiasts. And I love that Mainstone and presses like Mainstone have the opportunity to produce deluxe editions of these special books.

What a wonderful thing. You know, if you go to the beach, you'll take a paperback by Colleen Hoover, and it's unlikely to be admired. But not all books have to do the same thing. This is the wonderful thing about it, right? Absolutely. At the same time, we can not go to the beach, and we can stay at home,

and we can read a book about imaginary French literary bookshops. It's signalling of the most subtle and beautiful kind. Signalling. Going back to the signalling, what book you put out on your coffee table. Andy, let's just say you're in Liverpool. Let's just say Paul McCartney is popping round for dinner. What book do you put on your coffee table out of interest? I put all three of mine, Nicky.

Next question. The coffee table version. Yeah. Okay. That is a very sensible. No, just in desperation. I just sprinkle them across the table. And John, nice person.

No, I don't know. That's a very good question well what it wouldn't be is the beatles anthology although maybe it should be john what do you think well of course we talked about this before john published the beatles anthology yeah when i come on to my second choice that's words and pictures have always worked together so my second book is a book which more than any other book I know, if I ever feel jaded, tired, depressed about the industry that I'm in, about looking at books, I go to it. It's one of the books I give to people more regularly than any other. And in fact,

I'm in a current period where I don't have a copy of it. I think I must have bought this book 15 times over the last 20 years. It's a book called The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher. Alan Fletcher was one of the great designers, one of the founders of Pentagram Brilliant Design, and he became also art director of Fyden Books, a truly brilliant publisher. This book is 72 chapters of him thinking about looking about

the relationship between texts. There are quotes, there are optical illusions, there are scrawled notebooks, there are photographs of things he's found on the street, there are alphabets made out of pretzels. It's like being inside the mind, somebody's creative mind. People wonder what one of the deep kind of sources of what we were trying to do with QI was. That book with John Lloyd and I, it was a mutual favourite. It's called The Art of Looking Sideways, published by Fyden. So Fyden is the publisher not just of more orthodox art books

but the books that can be considered art in their own right. I don't think these really qualify as coffee table books because they're too small. But in the 90s, in the late 90s, Martin Parr published three volumes called Boring Postcards. Classic. Which are art books of postcards of very banal subjects. There's a USA volume and a Germany volume.

It's a wonderful, wonderful book. Okay. So guys, what does a coffee table book give us? Why do we love them all so much? Why do you think they're so special? Okay. My theory is this, inspired by our recent episode on Michael Powell. Michael Powell said that he believed film was the place that all different genres of art could find a home and be expressed as a synthesis on screen for the enjoyment of the public. And I feel the same is true of the coffee table book. The coffee table book is the place where different expertises in design, production, authorship, representation come together. They are the equivalent of...

Their film, the Pound Pressburgers film, The Red Shoes. Indeed, last Christmas, there was a coffee table book published about the films of Pound and Pressburger. It seems to me that that's the beauty, I use the word correctly, that's the beauty of a and Pressburger, it seems to me that that's the beauty, I use the word correctly, that's the beauty of a coffee table book. It is a space that can accommodate all different types of literary and artistic expertise. In my head, A coffee table book is the ultimate expression of the book, the flowing together of word and image. If you get that right, there's a famous quote by Montaigne where he's

horrified at the thought that somebody is just going to use his book to thumb through while staring out of a window. That's exactly what I feel books should be like. Great illustrated books are like small shrines where we go to get inspiration, to retrain our eyes, to retrain our minds and our thoughts in order to see new possibilities. They're the highest expression of the art of publishing, of design, of all of the things of typography.

I'm growing embarrassed by the use of the term coffee table book as we continue this discussion. It seems almost pathetic, doesn't it? It is pathetic, and I don't think it's a term that actually other cultures have. Presumably, though, as someone who's working in layout or something, you know and type setting and all those things this must be the it's the the biggest it's a big job isn't it it's like the fun

the real yeah the the most creative work you can do and when it works you know like madonna's sex when it works or like the beatles anthology you sell you know half a million copies of a 40 pound book that is uh as andy said full of text, full of images. When I, I've told this story before, but when I sat in that room at the Frankfurt Book Fair going through the page proofs of the Beatles anthology, I cried because it seemed to me that I was in the presence of something that was... Of the Beatles.

Absolutely. But, you know, brilliant. Great design, amazing text, and amazing story. You mentioned Madonna's sex book. I did a media studies A-level and had to do… That was one of the texts of our media studies A-level, was the coffee table book. Wow, was it?

And I had to write my exam essay on that book. I mean, it is… Very influential. I remember when that was published. It sold a million and a half copies it's still the fastest selling best-selling coffee table book of all time it's also one of the most in-demand out-of-print books but the martin amos called it something like the jaded confection of a something scandal manga didn't he it's a brilliant brilliant phrase also i would i would well we're with you know we're freestyling here how much less shocking sex by madonna would have been had it been published

in the age of the internet it's almost like the last 20th century scandal object and it's my love package sweeps everything away, right? Everybody having to sign NDAs before they were able to look at it. It was mad. Amazing. Nikki, why do you think, okay, we've answered your question. I'm going to ask you the same question. Why do people like them?

Why do you have them in your house? Even though you don't have a coffee table, you've got a coffee table book. Why? I think you're right. It's an object that it more than a book i think they're objects and collectible objects and i think you know it's the people who collect vinyl will collect coffee table books maybe um i think there's a guilty yeah and i i don't think you know it's people who you know will like to have objects in their house that are beautiful and i don't i think we've all got coffee table books those of us who have them but we haven't opened for a long

time but we have they are sitting there going we know this is good we know this is great but one day we'll look at it again and i and that's the thing isn't it one day we'll come back to this and enjoy it i've got i've got my final example is exactly that. I would like to stress to listeners that all the coffee table books discussed in this episode were actually bought for money by us, right? We weren't sent bungs on any of these. I bought this book a month ago. It's called Labyrinth, and it's by a man called Richard Morton Jack,

who is the author of the recent biography, excellent biography of Nick Drake. But Labyrinth is a whole other thing. It is an enormous and extremely heavy book about British jazz LPs from 1960 to 1975. I love that niche. But the thing is, Nick, it's so beautiful. It's 300 pages.

It costs between £60 and £70. Cheaper, may I say, than many of the lps described within it um it reproduces the front and back covers of a series of british jazz lps plus the labels on the records themselves plus a description of each lp plus reviews from the time. They saw you coming. All the elements of coffee table books that we've discussed in this episode for me, in terms of just me, Andy Miller, and my personal enthusiasms come together in that book. It's probably going to sell a few hundred copies,

but I'm so grateful. Just take my money, as the phrase goes. I'm so grateful that somebody cared enough about the subject to write it, produce it, manufacture it, and make it available to me. It is beautiful. And it makes me feel pleased to be in my own home every time i walk into the room and see it like the monolith it is on the sideboard i think oh that's nice that's my final choice what's john what's yours well i'm pulling all my themes together. I'm going to choose Letters of Note, which is possibly the book that kind of more perfectly expresses my view of what an illustrated book can do that nothing else can do. So Unbound's been going for about two weeks.

I get a call from Sean Usher. I already follow his amazing blog called Letters of Note. I go out to Manchester to see him, and he said, quite a few publishers have been on to me saying, you know, maybe you should do letters of love letters or letters between fathers and sons. And so I said, no, what we're going to do is this is, I said, imagine a massive kind of gallery, the Saatchi Gallery in London, and on the wall you have all of these incredible letters

written from different times of history. It's the most incredible exhibition. You laugh when you read kind of Bill Hicks. You cry when you read about the Rosenbergs being executed and their letters to their children. You're astonished by the letter from an escaped slave to his former master. You're kind of horrified when you read Elvis writing to Nixon, suggesting he should give him a badge and become a CIA agent.

And you come out, you reel out the letter of Mary, Queen of Scots. You reel out the Queen sending a drop scone recipe to Eisenhower. You reel out of the end of it. And what you want to then do is to go home and to properly unpack this rich human experience that you've been through. So you go and you buy a £30 exhibition catalog at the end of it and you take it home like Andy Miller and you you put it on your coffee table and you pick it up and you read it yeah okay and that's yeah and and he said that sounds great so I got one of the great book designers of all time Kaz Hildebrand to design it she designed all of Nigella's books. We did a great deal to publish it in the trade with Canongate.

And it was a top 10 bestseller, sold, I think, 200,000 copies. Wow. But it absolutely strikes me as the epitome of a book that you would have lying there on your table, and you could pick up and just dip into and find something i know glorious and i'm and the thing is it wouldn't you know the thing is what people think internet book let's do it cheap and cheerful and make it a paperback but actually what sean what sean was doing was he mean it's an overused word now but he was curating an exhibition. All I did was provide him with an exhibition catalogue.

Nicky, do we have any other coffee table book? I've just got one which I really want to mention because it describes the niches, and we're all talking about our own niches, and I don't think assassinations are my niche, but perhaps this one might be. This is the Clarks, as in the shoe, Clarks in Jamaica, which is a great book about,

that is a fantastic book that I actually bought and went to the sort of opening. What's it called? Clarks, like the shoe, Clarks in Jamaica. Yeah, Clarks in Jamaica. Yeah, written and designed by Al Fingers, and it's basically photographs of Jamaican musicians all wearing

clark's shoes and their love for clark's it's a fantastic book that's perfect that is perfect that is perfect and is that in print it is in print yeah it's by one love books you can you can get you can buy it yep amazing and how much how much is it it's about uh 30 pounds or 45 dollars but it's published in 2012 it's a great god you know i love this thing this is this is all part of it yeah a niche interest it only takes now a few hundred people well i mean this may be many more i don't know but like i noticed that titan Books are publishing a series of hardback illustrated books about, for instance, particular cult films. So they published a book about Withnell and I,

and they published a tremendous book about the Wicker Man. There's an incredible book about the film of The Shining, which was done as a crowdfunding model where you could order different levels of, you know, it was printed as the manuscript, the all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy manuscript. I mean, it's just, so John, given that publishers have flexibility and publishing, digital publishing means there's flexibility

that there wasn't 20, 30 years ago. Why are there reports of the coffee table book being endangered? I think it's just that the soggy middle has collapsed. I think people aren't going into bookshops and buying £30 books in the way that perhaps they did. Small independent publishers are continuing, particularly the ones that are using subscription or crowd funding to to letters of note saved unbound it was a massive injection of of cash when we needed it

the book trade now is a much tougher place to to go out with with with a 30 35 pound large format book um you know we we did really well with with the d with the Douglas Adams book we did before Christmas, number one bestseller. It sold through well. But those are rare now. I don't think there are many books, if you look at the Nielsen that are doing that. All of the things that we've said about coffee table books are still valid. I just think that people are finding different ways of doing it. Like this incredibly clever man, Stephen Elcock, who curates a load of really, really cool images on Instagram and then turns them into these beautiful, but quite nicely priced mini coffee table books. Espresso books.

Hoxton Mini Press do some incredible books. Fantastic books, yeah. Like Hoxton Minixton mini press as you said it's the niche that survives you have a friend who likes outdoor swimming you give them a book on the lido yeah right you know and that's what you do it's those tiny niches that we satisfy through coffee table books well also like in fact like our our former guest j Haisley says, the successful podcasts are often niche, but they go deep. Yeah. You know, and in a sense,

a coffee table book does that, doesn't it? It explores in depth a subject which might superficially seem of interest to a few hundred people only. Anyway, our message to the consumer is coffee table books books use them or lose them so um so john take us out i was afraid that's where we got to leave it we must put the large teetering pile of expensive large format visually rich and more important than they look ctbs back

onto the ctbs man back onto the virtual backlisted coffee table until next time if you would like show notes uh with clips links and suggestions for further reading for this show including all the very expensive books we've mentioned on today and the 206 shows that we've already recorded please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you would like to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. And we're still keen to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook,

Instagram, Blue Sky, and especially on Patreon. John, how can our listeners bombard us with their choices of coffee table books? They can listen early and ad-free to our Patreon, which is www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits. If you subscribe at the lot list 11 for a monthly fee that's a fraction of the cost of the cheapest coffee table book, you'll get not one but two extra exclusive podcasts every month. Locklisted features the

three of us talking and recommending the books films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. For those of you who enjoyed our what have you been reading slot that's where you now find it it's an hour of tunes musings superior book chat plus lot listeners get their names read out accompanied by lashings of praise like this. Eleanor Neal, thank you. Tanya Spooner, thank you. JB Points, thank you. Gemma Leithwood, thank you.

Dan Jenkins, thank you. Michelle Garneau, thank you. Peter Merritt, thank you. Jonathan McNaught, thank you. Jill Bennett, thank you. Peter Lavelle, thank you jonathan mcnaught thank you jill bennett thank you peter lavelle thank you thank you for listening we'll see you in a couple of weeks with a more traditional kitchen table episode of bat listed see you then bye