New York City Coffee Table Book – Still undecided on what to get someone who likes to enjoy the armchair glimpse of New York – yourself included? If you can handle the load – in pounds (11) and price ($250) – “New York in New York” (Assoline) is the perfect gift. This majestic five-circuit kaleidoscopic tour captures the city’s evolution through immigration, trade, culture, skyscrapers, and famous photographers (among them Edward Steichen and Weggie) and celebrated writers (including Edith Wharton, Ebby White, Tom Wolfe). Protest movements in text and over 300 examples.
The book has a foreword by Jay McInerney, a suburban transplant who has never looked back, and author Wendell Jamison, a former metro editor for the New York Times, says, “New York is both permanent and temporary, and that’s perhaps the greatest contradiction of all.”
New York City Coffee Table Book
Kate Asher and Thomas Melins have released “New York Rising: An Unveiled Story from the Durst Collection” ($60; The Monacelli Press) of 35,000 items donated by the developer’s Seymour Durst family to Columbia University’s Avery Library of Architecture and the Arts in 2011. ). Maps, ephemera, photographs and other illustrations generously populate the 10 chapters, ranging from “Moving People” to “Reviving Times Square” and written by a team of municipal experts including Russell Short, Hilary Ballon (died 2017). ) Andrew Dolkart, Carol Willis, Ann Buttenwieser, and Lynne B. Sagalyn.
Ny Through The Lens
“In the Shadow of Genius: The Brooklyn Bridge and Its Inventors” ($34.95; Empire State Publications/Fordham University Press) looks back through the lens of decades-long photographer Barbara Mensch, and the engineers who gaze upon the subject at the Maritime Warehouse. Her images are charming and unusual, her discoveries candid and personal as she writes convincingly to describe the Roebling family’s intelligence.
Singer Rosanne Cash writes in the preface to this season’s merry Christmas postcards: “We yearn for joy, but at the end of the year, if there’s a lot of loss accumulated in our lives, we’ll have to deal with our longing.” And happy memories of Christmases past.” “100 Christmas Wishes: Vintage Holiday Cards from the New York Public Library” ($17.99; St. Martin’s Griffin) is absolutely heartwarming. Consisting of six detachable and reusable postcards, the book is a poignant reminder of how earlier generations wished for, in Ms. Cash’s words, “peace, joy, magic, bounty, family and light to ‘shine around the world.'”
If the holiday cards aren’t inspiring enough, then read “Sacred Shelter: Thirteen Journeys of Homelessness and Healing,” edited by Susan Celia Greenfield ($105 for hardcover, $30 for paperback, Empire State Publications/Fordham University Press). In New York, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York partnered with homelessness and housing to provide royalties with life experiences and faith-sharing partners as reminders that individuals can make a difference.
Inside New York City’s Best Homes
The title of “Recovered Memory: New York and Paris 1960-1980” ($45; Daylight Books) speaks for itself. Frank Van Riper’s black-and-white photographs and accompanying text capture two unlikely decades that will never be duplicated. Mr. Van Riper captures the town’s delight on the cover: a couple parachuting into Coney Island.
Speaking of Brooklyn, Larry Racippo’s “Brooklyn Before: Photographs 1971-1983” ($34.95; Three Hills/Cornell University Press), with essays by Tom Robbins and Julia Van Haften, captures faces that seem frozen in the background, surprisingly sober. Today’s circuit. Still, Mr. Robbins wrote, even then, “life went on as normal.”
Marla Hamburg Kennedy offers a “behind” look in “Brooklyn: Photographs Now” ($55; Rizzoli New York), Philip Loppet, Brooklyn native and James Agee, who returned after 30 years away from college: “Everywhere a returning traveler saw signs of change. , signs of no change, signs of change but very fast, signs of change but not so quick, millions of signs”.
Reinventing Columbus Circle By Daniel Gross
Rarely seen interiors are also commemorated in “New York Magnificence: The City’s Most Unforgettable Rooms” ($85; Rizzoli New York), by Wendy Moonan. Stunning photographs and explanatory text provide a rare glimpse into the craft of the famous designers and architects who created the Brook Astor Library and enhanced the Gracie Mansion.
