Slush Pile for the Holidays!

How many shopping days are left? It'll take approximately the same amount of time to dig my office out from beneath the seasonal onslaught of gift books, many of them coffee table photo books for which I, humble journalist, have no coffee table. Thus, leaping from title to title, we start the emergency, shovel-my-way-to-freedom Holiday Edition Slush Pile with Pop Surf Culture (Santa Monica Press, $39.95), which surveys album covers, movie posters, fashion, and movie icons like Annette Funicello (because she really knew how to surf, right?). Also on the beach are, yes, the Beach Boys and Dick Dale. The design vibe and cultural cues are all retro, like the Tiki fad or hot-rod mags. And what might be called high surf culture effectively ends, in these pages at least, before skateboarding and grunge. Entirely absent is our current vogue of surfing as emblem of consumption or vacationing, the Laird Hamilton-branded upscale leisure and lifestyle pursuit by way of Hawaiian real estate and Patagonia catalog porn. A short few final chapters try (unpersuasively) to extend the old lineage into recent decades, but Pop Surf Culture mainly celebrates a vintage aesthetic that may've ended with The Endless Summer (or maybe Big Wednesday). The sport was never pure or uncommercialized (hence all the design artifacts), but it was a more innocent form of commercialization.

Oh, but there couldn't be surfing without...
In Water: The Essence of Life (Duncan Baird, $29.95), along with aerial photos of glaciers, oceans, and deserts, we learn some disturbing facts. Like that a hamburger requires over 600 gallons of water to produce (as compared to 6 for a potato). And that the energy and carbon footprint of bottled water makes it 10,000 more expensive to produce than a comparable dose of tap water. The eco-warnings are perhaps best suited for kids, though parents may learn a thing or two during bedtime reading sessions. (Extra bonus: penguin photos.)

Related (from the same publisher, in fact), Clouds ($24.95) shows us where much of the planet's water is actually contained. Or cycled, since it's constantly flowing down to earth to sea and back up again. Global warming figures here (as above), though the cloud-spotting and meteorology aspect is less comprehensive than the recent The Weather of the Pacific Northwest published by UW expert Cliff Mass.

But where do the clouds and water and weather come from? All is explained in The Encyclopedia of Earth: A Complete Visual Guide (University of California Press, $39.95), ideal for the smart, curious child, since its many illustrations include both penguins and sharks. Also: bubbling volcanoes, Egyptian hieroglyphs, burrowing moles, comprehensive maps, charts, and diagrams, and neatly color-coded flippable sections--including the ominous "Human Impact." And we all know from Al Gore what that is.

Oh, but let's take a break from environmental gloom and doom! Let's sip tea in The English Garden (Phaidon, $24.95)! There's nothing about resource conservation here--just spread after spread of spectacular, multi-acre estates that require dozens of gardeners (servants? serfs?) to tend. And a lot of English history in the thumbnail descriptions of each garden. We meet noted figures including Thomas More, Inigo Thomas, John Ruskin, and Edwin Lutyens. So it's not all lawn porn. We learn a little something, too.

And if you want to learn more, a lot more, try The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages, 1851-2008 (Black Dog & Leventhal, $60), which will crush most coffee tables. Something like the complete New Yorker cartoon anthologies, this one comes with DVDs, since only 300 actual covers are contained in the volume. Here are World War II, the Titanic sinking, Son of Sam, the Great Depression, and, more recently, the Iraq War. Gradually we move from a text-only front page, up to eight columns wide, into the era of graphics, illustrations, and, finally color photos. In an age when most of the NYT is already searchable on the Web, when many of us compulsively surf from news story to news story, the mode of flipping through a large, heavy, and incomplete book does seem archaic. (I like the section intros better, written by NYT staff and with better photos.) And yet there are pleasant surprises. Back on May 21, 1980, three days after our Mount St. Helens erupted, how many in our region actually read the NYT or had it delivered to our homes? And yet there we are, dominating the national news, with a front-page photo spread--by a local amateur photographer!--tiled vertically down the center of the most important paper in the world.