Every Christmas, I’m sure to unwrap coffee table books about a pop culture thing I’m obsessed with. I have Mamma Mia! How Can I Resist You? and The Art of Mad Max: Fury Road and Guillermo del Toro Cabinet of Curiosities now stashed away on my bookshelf to one day pull out and display. If you, like me, have ever stopped to wonder about the history of coffee table books, the answer is more complicated than you think. Let’s take a walk through book history to find out why it is we’re sure to get at least one of these books every holiday season.
“Nonbooks”
“I am vexed that my essays only serve the ladies for a common movable, a book to lay in the parlor window…” writes Michel de Montaigne in his 1580 essay Upon Some Verses of Virgil, one of the first references to a book used as a decoration rather than one picked up and read. Later, in 1759, Laurence Sterne references Montaigne’s comment in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman saying his work would, “in the end, prove the very thing Montaigne dreaded his Essays should turn out, that is, a book for a parlor window” — books not used for reading, but rather for display.
Author of A History of Book Publishing in the United States John Tebbel says the coffee table book is a descendant of this kind of “nonbook,” which can be “traced back to the period after the American Civil War.” Christine Mary Elliott whose thesis explored the invention and rise in popularity of coffee table books says this term, nonbook, referred to collections of cartoons, photographs, and other “scissor and paste” anthologies. These collections were often displayed in parlors, purely for display and casual flipping-through.
A Time Magazine article noted an increase in the purchasing of these nonbooks in the 1950s when coffee table books (and coffee tables) rose to popularity. These nonbooks served as a precursor to the coffee table book you recognize today.