Okay, we admit, we went a bit crazy this year, following the dictum that the best kind of gift to receive is something that you’d never buy for yourself — something a bit outlandish, a bit over-the-top in concept and maybe even price. So why buy a $12.95 paperback of MAD artist Don Martin when you can have it all — 1200 pages in two volumes, $150. To be fair, there’s also the relatively modestly priced, revelatory Punk House, not to mention the one-of-a-kind book-length photo essay Confidential, and the downright bizarre Pierre et Gilles and Gothic & Lolita. And if you’re looking for something a bit higher-minded, there’s always Edward Hopper (in one of the darker coffee-table modern-master art books you’ll see this year) and the ever-rewarding Herodotus — with lots of maps! Enjoy.

	The Completely MAD Don Martin Don Martin Don Martin’s work for MAD  is instantly recognizable: his people are big-nosed schmoes with sleepy eyes, puffs of wiry hair, and what appear to be life preservers under the waistline of their clothes. ( full review ) BY CHARLES TAYLOR
	Confidential Alison Jackson Confidential is direct, snarky, and brazen; a coffee-table gift book dipped in superstar grime. Jackson fearlessly tugs away at the curtain that separates what we assume we know and what we really know about our icons and movers-and-shakers, and the result is stunning. ( full review ) BY SHARON STEEL
	Gothic & Lolita Masayuki Yoshinaga Masayuki Yoshinaga’s brilliant street-style photographs of Japanese teenagers and twentysomethings document a fantastic subculture in rare form. ( full review ) BY SHARON STEEL
	Pierre et Gilles: Double je, 1976–2007 Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard Imagine a metacampy, hyperstylized mashup of James Bidgood, David LaChappele, John Waters, and whoever the hell shoots Inches magazine, and you have a sense of the otherworldly allure of these photos. ( full review ) BY MICHAEL BRODEUR
	The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories Edited by Robert B. Strassler Translated by Andrea L. Purvis Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BC) was, as all fans of dead white male European authors know, the inventor of what we today call history, and The Landmark Herodotus may well be the greatest English language edition ever published. ( full review ) BY PETER KADZIS
	Punk House: Interiors In Anarchy Photography by Abby Banks Edited by Thurston Moore Kitchens become live-in sculptures, with full place settings glued to the ceiling; collages abound; and Americana kitsch sits side-by-side with giant vinyl collections, spare guitars, half-finished paintings, and other art in progress. ( full review ) BY MATT ASHARE
	To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios By Karen Paik It’s easy to forget that all these perfectly realized characters and settings, presented with such élan, are only so many lines of code, an aggregation of ones and zeros. ( full review ) BY MIKE MILIARD
	Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper By Walter Wells Hopper, who was the subject of a major retrospective this summer at the Museum of Fine Arts, is America’s dark poet, the creator of the iconic Nighthawks, a man who painted film noir before the cinema discovered it. ( full review ) BY JEFFREY GANTZ
	30,000 Years of Art By the editors of Phaidon Press It’s 1000 art greatest hits laid out chronologically, one per page, each with its own dry encyclopedia-style description. ( full review ) BY GREG COOK
	The Sixties Photographs by Robert Altman Earth mamas and papas feeling groovy on the commune. ( full review ) BY JAMES PARKER
	Rock And Roll Photographs by Lynn Goldsmith The woman appears to have photographed everybody — the rugged democracy of showbiz prevails, from Patti Smith to Carlos Santana. ( full review ) BY JAMES PARKER
	The Art of William Steig By Claudia Nahson, et al. Steig’s work was sometimes mistaken for simplistic, but the 281 illustrations here actually reveal a sharp-eyed, Picasso-loving, funny, empathetic social observer. ( full review ) BY GREG COOK