books
by
E.F. ULMANN
Reading for Pleasure What to give the book lovers on your holiday list
A
48 | AVENUE MAGAZINE · DECEMBER 2010
Above: Cecil Beaton: The Art of the Scrapbook from Assouline
work of the society architect, a competitor of Addison Mizner. Website: www.acanthuspress.com Assouline is a publisher that goes in for original and graphically interesting books, and for luxury gifts. You can check out their stuff at www.assouline.com, or visit the stunning store in the mezzanine of The Plaza Hotel. Their blockbuster gift idea ($250 in cloth overboard and a slip case) is Cecil Beaton: The Art of the Scrapbook, which reproduces for the first time the iconic photographer’s visual diaries. Also from Assouline is Over the Top: Fifty Years of Fantasy Gifts from the Neiman Marcus Christmas Catalogue, hardly over the top at $50, considering the outrageous fantasy gifts that have been offered over the years. Rizzoli is the behemoth of fine book publishing with some 250 titles each year. The parent company owns the sophisticated eponymous bookstore on West 57th Street. For holiday gift books we recommend two titles reviewed in these pages: Jamee Gregory’s entertaining New York Parties: Private Views and Duane Hampton’s splendid monograph on her late husband, Mark Hampton: An American Decorator. For the sportsman, Rizzoli has two books produced in collaboration with Orvis: Great Fishing Lodges of North
COURTESY OF ASSOULINE
s we like to point out, a book is the ideal holiday gift. Cynthia Conigliaro, owner of the elegant Lexington bookstore Archivia (first “i” short as in “skivvy”), explains that’s “because a book says so much about the giver and the recipient. It shows that one has been listening as a friend.” Presents may not get you friends, but they might buy you a better class of enemy. The suave and erudite Mark Magowan—co-owner with Alexis Gregory of Vendome Press, which publishes 10-to-15 books a year of dazzling quality and taste at a reasonable price—puts it this way: “What else can you get for $50, half a necktie?” So, let’s start with Vendome. The lineup of titles is as impressive as that of the Magowan family’s (former) baseball team, the San Francisco Giants. And they won the World Series, as you may remember. Vendome has two architectural books: Peter Pennoyer’s monograph on his apartments, townhouses and country houses and the Knight of Glin’s Irish Country House. The first is by New York’s classical architectural genius, the successor to R.A.M Stern. The latter is by Ireland’s gift to the arts and the bearer of one of those Celtic titles that so enrich our lives. Also from Vendome is Lars Bolander’s Scandinavian Design by Heather Smith MacIsaac with all you would like to know about hyperborean taste and design. Check it out at www.vendomepress.com. Acanthus Press specializes in books “at the intersection of material culture and architectural history . . . the undiscovered, the under-appreciated, the rare, and exceptional.” True to form, their holiday offerings are Syrie Maugham: Staging Glamorous Interiors by Pauline C. Metcalf and Maurice Fatio: Palm Beach Architect by Kim I. Mockler. The first is a monograph on the work of the ethereal decorator and one-time wife of genius writer and dubious character W. Somerset Maugham. The second is the definitive book on the