Coffee Table Book Gifts for Your Favorite New Yorker

This article was originally published in The New York Times here.

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By Sam Roberts

Still undecided about what to get someone deserving — yourself included — who loves to savor armchair glimpses of New York? If you can handle the freight — both in pounds (11) and price ($250) — “New York by New York” (Assouline) is the perfect gift. This majestic five-borough kaleidoscopic tour enlists distinguished photographers (among them, Edward Steichen and Weegee) and celebrated writers (including Edith Wharton, E.B. White, Tom Wolfe) to capture the evolution of the city through immigration, maritime commerce, culture, skyscrapers, protest movements in text and more than 300 illustrations.

The book has a foreword by Jay McInerney, a suburban transplant who never looked back, and its author is Wendell Jamieson, the former Metro editor of The New York Times, who writes that “New York is both permanent and fleeting, and that’s perhaps the greatest contradiction of all.”
Kate Ascher and Thomas Mellins mined the 35,000 items that the developer Seymour Durst’s family donated in 2011 to Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library to produce “New York Rising: An Illustrated History From the Durst Collection” ($60; the Monacelli Press). Maps, ephemera, photographs and other illustrations generously punctuate the 10 chapters on subjects ranging from “Moving the People” to “Remaking Times Square” and written by an A-team of municipal experts that includes Russell Shorto, Hilary Ballon (who died in 2017), Andrew Dolkart, Carol Willis, Ann Buttenwieser and Lynne B. Sagalyn.

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Want more coffee table book ideas? Head to the New York Times!