Episode Details

In 1581 Michel de Montaigne complained in his essay Upon Some Verses of Virgil that readers treated his books as common moveables, laid out in parlor windows for show. In 1759 Laurence Sterne joked in Tristram Shandy that he hoped his own book would become exactly that. The modern format arrived after World War II, when Albert Skira and other European publishers produced large folio and quarto art books with color plates tipped in by hand. In 1960 David Brower of the Sierra Club launched the Exhibit Format Series with This Is the American Earth, featuring Ansel Adams, and insisted the pages be too large to take in at a single glance.

The term coffee table book appeared in Arts Magazine in 1961, and The Coffee Table Book of Astrology followed in 1962. Madonna's 1992 book Sex, with its spiral bound metal cover, became the fastest selling of the kind. The same image heavy format served state messaging for Walter Ulbricht in East Germany and Enver Hoxha in Albania, and later became a world building tool for films like Blade Runner and for video game art books.

• The Sierra Club published 20 titles in the Exhibit Format Series.
• Sex remained the most searched for out of print coffee table book decades later.
• Media scholar Henry Jenkins argues Blade Runner's world was too dense to absorb in one viewing, which made its art book valuable.
• Early arcade games had no art books; the artwork lived on cabinets and cartridge boxes, and Capcom Illustrations appeared in 1995.
• Some franchise art books credit individual designers in detail, while others present the work as studio property.