Any good art books for Christmas?

It might be a little late to ask, but I'm wondering if anyone got good art books for Christmas. For LT's SantaThing, I've asked for art books the last couple of years and have received some good ones, particularly since they are not at all what I would have bought for myself. This past Christmas, my Santa sent me Gaza Graffiti: Messages of Love and Politics by Mia Grondahl, a Swedish photographer who seems to specialize in the Palestinian community. After a brief introduction, the book is chaptered into: Calligraphy, Politics, Portraits, Congratulations (mostly concerning weddings), and Murals. Many images depict the Diwani script (new to me), which is a cursive Arabic script developed during the reign of the early Ottoman Turks and is quite beautiful. To be honest, I'm not sure Grondahl always does justice to the source images, since her photos seem a bit on the grainy side and are often tiled together on the page with no margins between shots. But she does convey a strong sense of the boldness and energy of these often ephemeral productions.

Anybody else get a good book for the holiday?

It's extremely difficult to find, but you will be contributing to a praiseworthy humanistic pressure on the publisher and distributors if you attempt to find MONUMENTS AND THE ART OF MOURNING, by Philipp Fehl. It's based on close investigations of the tombs of the Popes. Happy hunting!

I treated myself to Hendrick de Keyser : Beeldhouwer en bouwmeester van Amsterdam, a vintage (1930) study of a 17th century Dutch architect and sculptor. Does that count?

> 3. It sure does count. At a certain point in life, you become your own best Santa, and Santa nearly always gives the best gifts.

Were you interested in de Keyser before seeing this book, or did the book sell you on de Keyser?

Over the holidays I treated myself to the Robert Motherwell and Jeff Wall Catalogue Raissonnes. :)