Maybe it’s because I’m in college, and I can’t walk through my room without tripping over clothes and my idea of entertaining my friends is yelling at them to “BYOB” and congregate with me at the time and place of my choosing, but does anyone under 40 ever actually use coffee table books for their intended purpose?
Coffee table books are those large, typically hardcover, visually based books that usually feature some sort of photography or art.
Real adults get some of these and put them on their coffee table to alleviate boredom in the guests they entertain and to act as a conversation piece.
These books are often found in the bargain aisles of Barnes & Noble and the like, and unless I get one as a gift that’s the only place I’d ever get one because I can’t imagine paying $20 for something I can’t even read.
But although I lack a coffee table, there are some of these books that are really refreshing and creative.
The book that sets the standard for what this “genre” should be is “PostSecret,” compiled by Frank Warren.
“PostSecret” is a by-mail art project where people are encouraged to snail mail a decorated postcard with a secret on it that they’ve never told anyone else.
The more intriguing secrets are published in books, included in museum exhibits or uploaded onto Warren’s blog.
The secrets range from heartbreaking (“I love one of my children”), the offensive (“I converted because I think I look sexy in a headscarf”), the liberating (“I checked into a hotel next to the train tracks…and exhibited myself nude at night in the window”) and the silly (“When I’m mad at my husband I put boogers in his soup”).
It takes a very unique book to make me feel like I understand humankind better, and “PostSecret” is one of them.
And accessing many of the secrets is free on the Web site.
Comedy writers have embraced the coffee table book as a medium, and I think the cream of the crop of this phenomenon are the books published by the fake news site “The Onion.”
I’ve always been a fan of the site’s “retro” headlines, so I recommend “Our Dumb Century” due to its 192 pages of fake headlines pulled from 20th century events.
My personal headline favorites are “Holy Shit! Man Walks on the Fucking Moon,” “Martin Luther King: ‘I Had a Really Weird Dream Last Night’” and the classic “Hitler Commits Suicide; Ravaging of Europe a ‘Desperate Cry for Help.’”
And then of course, blogs are publishing what are inevitably some of the coolest coffee table books.
Thank the power of the Internet for getting some of the most absurd title deals with Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Some of the more notable blogs that are getting published (to me at least) are “Look at this fucking hipster,” a Web site where users are encouraged to send pictures of the most ridiculous hipsters they can find.
“Passive Aggressive Notes,” where notes are left that have that certain amount of rudeness while still trying to be polite prevail; and “FML,” a Twitter-like site where users post crappy things that happened to them that day that end with the catchphrase “FML,” or “Fuck My Life.”
Coffee table books are typically a lot more precisely themed than your average novel, and can be a breath of fresh air from those novels with all their fancy words.
I recommend them after a long day of schoolwork when you never want to look at a page of text again.
Better Read: Enjoy coffee table books without the coffee table
Published: Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Updated: Wednesday, November 4, 2009
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