Taylor, tigers - the perfect tonic for a winters day. The most dazzling picture books of the year
Icons of Style is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Icons Of Style: Taylor Swift by Glenys Johnson Welbeck £14.99, 224pp
I wasn’t aware that the planet’s biggest pop star was also an ‘icon of style’, but judging by this modest volume, she certainly is. It does help that she only has to pull on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts to look good, but many of her more elaborate costumes are pretty effective too. This, then, is the pointless Taylor Swift book that Swifities didn’t know they needed but will rush out and buy anyway. ‘Swift effortlessly transitions from vintage-inspired looks to contemporary, edgier ensembles – always maintaining an air of sophistication,’ says a fashion psychologist, as they do. Only very occasionally does Swift, right, look ridiculous, which is probably par for the course but rarer than, say, Madonna. Johnson’s prose isn’t up to much, but the pictures are the thing. Oh to be so talented, and so beautiful at the same time!
Man's Best Friend is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Man’s Best Friend by The Kennel Club Wildfire £16.99, 144pp
The Kennel Club, which describes itself as ‘the oldest and most illustrious such organisation in the world’, has an archive of more than two million dog-related photos and illustrations, and this is a sneaky peek into it. There are big dogs, small dogs, brave dogs and beautiful dogs, all of them long dead, as their owners are too.
Most of these 130 images have never been published before, and they all have text telling the stories behind them. There are soldiers’ companion dogs in the First World War, as well as a rare photogravure of Dandy, winner of the first organised dog show in 1859.
You would do well to come up with a better present for a dog lover than this – other than another dog, of course.
Living With Greys is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Living With Greys by Tarquin Millington-Drake Merlin Unwin £50, 160pp
Here’s the first of this Christmas’s big eco-books, a sweet and hopeful tale of grey partridges, one of the country’s most endangered bird species. Tarquin Millington-Drake is a photographer, fly-fisher and travel expert who found, to his luck, that there was a grey partridge restoration project at Geoff Ponsonby’s farm down the road. He spent many happy hours stalking, learning about and photographing the birds, and then wrote this book about them. Grey partridges originally fell foul of intensive farming methods but now, thanks to habitat renewal with lots of nice tasty insects for them to eat, their numbers are on the up, from 17 pairs in 2017 on Ponsonby’s farm to 135 pairs now.
Millington-Drake’s book is a slow-burning labour of love, and his photography is luminescent.
Local Legends by Horst A. Friedrichs and John Warland Prestel £32.50, 336pp
This is possibly my favourite book of the year, or indeed any year. It’s subtitled ‘The Hidden Pubs Of London’ and it’s a pictorial record, above right, of just under 40 boozers that are distinctive and/or memorable. Most of them are small, most are old and all are immaculately well kept.
These are what they call ‘wet’ pubs in the main – no food, or very little beyond the odd ancient bread roll – and judging by these photos, they are full of old men clutching pints and wondering what to do with the rest of their lives. I have already visited one or two and am planning trips to some of the others. There are no Wetherspoons here, no Sky Sports, no karaoke, no weekly quizzes, just beer, low light and more cloth caps than you could shake a stick at. I’m keeping this one and no, you can’t borrow it.
George Hoyningen-Huene is available now from the Mail Bookshop
George Hoyningen-Huene by Susanna Brown Thames & Hudson £75, 328pp
This enormous, back-breaking tome may possibly be the campest book ever published. Hoyningen-Huene was a photographer whose ‘visual innovations shaped the world of high fashion, film and international travel’. Whatever, he mainly took photos of girls with very small breasts and men with their shirts off, and he lived in Tunisia with a man with the even more brilliant name of Horst B. Horst. From St Petersburg, he rocked with the bohemians of 1920s Paris and then moved to Hollywood, where he became friends with Katharine Hepburn, above, George Cukor and Greta Garbo, gay icons all. I’d never heard of him and I’m still not convinced it’s not a giant hoax, but the photos are amazing and fashion victims everywhere will be queueing up for it, assuming they have managed to hire the industrial hydraulic equipment they’ll need just to lift it up.
A Year of Flower Wreaths is available now from the Mail Bookshop
A Year Of Flower Wreaths by Malin Bjorkholm Batsford £20, 224pp
Wreaths aren’t just for Christmas, they’re for all year round, says Bjorkholm, a professional florist and Instagram ‘influencer’. This is, at heart, a cookbook for wreaths, full of detailed instructions on how to make your own wreath and wonderful photos of plants being bent in odd directions. There are many, many different types of plant here and quite a lot of hands doing stuff. It’s both a hugely useful how-to manual and a completely relaxing volume to thumb through of a winter’s afternoon. You already know whether or not you want this book for Christmas.
The Art of Climbing is available now from the Mail Bookshop
The Art Of Climbing by Simon Carter Thames & Hudson £30, 256pp
There seem to me to be two sorts of people: one group who when they see a sheer face of rock want to climb it, and the other group, the fear-of-heights brigade, which includes me, much happier indoors. This book is a startling collection of photographs of the first group negotiating their terrifying ascents, often with ropes and crampons, but occasionally without. The text is by various hands and seeks to explain the origins and appeal of this obvious madness to those of us whose idea of a noble quest is a walk to the corner shop at the top of the road. Carter’s photos tell the story better, though. I’m sure that some of these people want to stay alive, but not half as much as I do.
Viewpoint is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Viewpoint by Jo Bradford Ilex £30, 256pp
This book is subtitled ‘Human Stories Through The Smartphone Lens’ and that describes it to a T. Bradford has already written three books about smartphone photos, and here she has invited a horde of professional photographers to contribute the best shots they have taken on their phones. Each photo tells a story, or rather a snippet of a story, and we the viewers fill in the gaps with our imaginations. Why is this old man smiling? What is that woman thinking? ‘There’s joy in the mundane,’ says one photographer.
‘It’s the constraints and juxtapositions in life that make it endlessly enriching,’ says another.
In other words, here are random snaps by more than 50 talented photographers, and a wonderful tribute to the sheer range of human creativity, something that never fails to fascinate.
Versailles from the Sky is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Versailles From The Sky by Thomas Garnier Thames & Hudson £40, 208pp
We all know the maleficent uses of drone technology, but here’s one use that almost makes up for all that. Thomas Garnier is the official photographer of the Palace of Versailles – nice work if you can get it – and he has been given permission to fly drones over the chateau, its gardens, lakes and woodlands, all 2,014 acres of it. What we get is a variety of images of exceptional beauty, never previously seen by anyone other than passing birds and the odd helicopter. The book is a wonderful, calming thing, best leafed through with a cup of tea to hand and an awful lot of chocolate biscuits. It’s the next best thing to walking around the palace, above, and probably the next best thing to living there and actually being king of France. Let them eat cake indeed.
Remembering Tigers is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Remembering Tigers by Wildlife Photographers United Remembering Wildlife £49.50, 160pp
Here’s the latest astounding volume – the ninth, no less – of the Remembering Wildlife series, to which wildlife photographers contribute their best shots of a particular endangered species and then donate their royalties to keeping that species alive.
This year’s beneficiary is the tiger, whose numbers in the wild are up to 5,500, but it’s still not enough. The photos here are often breathtaking, a little like having a tiger on your windpipe, and seem sure to add to the £1.15million raised for conservation projects since 2016. The tigers are doing what tigers do, wandering around, lying down, drinking water from ponds, playing
Wilding by Isabella Tree and Angela Harding Macmillan £20, 96pp
Isabella Tree’s original book with this title, about her pioneering rewilding project at Knepp in West Sussex, sold 300,000 copies, won a sheaf of awards and sits very happily on the shelf next to my desk. This reimagined version introduces Angela Harding’s blissful and evocative illustrations, left, plus maps, timelines and suggestions on ways to rewild your own green space, should you have one. I can’t really speak highly enough of this wonderful book, for there are treats on every page.
At Knepp, we learn, they have 500 different types of moth and 38 varieties of butterfly, including the large tortoise butterfly, previously thought to have been extinct in Britain for half a century. No longer. And who knew that dock leaves, usually used only to soothe nettle stings, are delicious when eaten either raw or cooked, with more vitamin C than oranges and more vitamin A than carrots?
A Year Full of Pots is available now from the Mail Bookshop
A Year Full Of Pots by Sarah Raven Bloomsbury £27, 416pp
Here’s the second cookery book about gardening this year, a year-long diary of keeping and growing plants in pots out in your garden. Sarah Raven has 382 pots in her garden, which is obviously a very particular form of lunacy, but the riot of colour that the garden becomes in summer is a convincing argument in favour.
Here are the many benefits of her decades of experience with pots, stunningly photographed by Jonathan Buckley and with loads of sage advice.
Did you know, for example, that May is the month for ‘slightly crazy’ tulips? Raven adores varieties called the Helmar and the Flaming Parrot, which ‘are too gaudy for some, but not me’. She plants them in well-positioned pots, ‘so we see them silhouetted by light whenever we leave the house’. Raven’s is a strongly theatrical view of pot-planting, and all the more entertaining for that.
