Beautiful Books to Grace Your Hamptons Coffee Table

Clear off your coffee table book lovers, it’s that time of year again. Time to spruce up your living room with some of the best big books to hit the market recently.

Cool down with The Arctic Melt: Images of a Disappearing Landscape (Assouline, $95, 4/20 release) by universally acclaimed art and environmental photographer—and Water Mill resident—Diane Tuft. The book chronicles Tuft’s journey into the Arctic Circle to capture photographs of the North Pole; the mountain glaciers of Svalbard, Norway; and the icebergs and ice sheets of Greenland. In more than 50 stunning photos, Tuft captures the ice before the constant melt caused by global warming renders the once-frozen landscape unrecognizable. The artist, who has show extensively across the East End, will be will be part of Patton Miller’s East End Collected3 show at the Southampton Arts Center on April 15 and will be discussing and signing her new book at BookHampton in East Hampton on June 3.

Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century (Verso, $50) by acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith came out just before last summer. Capital is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York, composed entirely of quotations drawn from an array of sources including histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, government documents and emails,.all organized into categories with an eye to revealing the true essence of the megalopolis we all know and love. It’s a unique and infinitely interesting book, perfect for thumbing through or diving into.

Peter Marino’s Hamptons estate covers 12 acres and is a stark contrast to his biker-style persona, what with all the leather and tattoos. In The Garden of Peter Marino (Rizzoli, $85) we get to see a slightly different side of the Harley-riding architect. The book shows Marino’s home landscape featuring curated plants, trees, and flowers—including a “color wheel” of purple, pink, red, and yellow gardens—an apple orchard, a formal rose garden and nearly forty works of art.

Grace: The American Vogue Years (Phaidon, $175), the follow up to 2015’s reissue of Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion at Vogue, showcases the legendary Creative Director at Large of American Vogue, Grace Coddington’s work from the last 15 years of her career. It’s the second and final volume of Phaidon’s collected works of Coddington and comes in a handsome, slipcase edition. The book celebrates 17 of the master photographers Coddington collaborated with, including Steven Meisel, Annie Leibovitz, Marcus Piggot and others.

Also be on the lookout for Out East: Houses and Gardens of the Hamptons from Vendome Press, due out in July. The book captures the enduring appeal of East End architecture with photographs capturing the extraordinary gardens, verandas, pavilions, farmhouses and converted barns by Sag Harbor-based photographer Tria Giovan. Southampton resident Ash Ruddick leads readers on an insider’s tour of more than 25 homes, cottages and pool houses.

You might have seen The End by Michael Dwek on Ralph and Dylan Lauren’s, Paul McCartney’s or Calvin Klein’s coffee table. The book was originally published in 2006 and became an instant classic, fueled by its groundbreaking narrative form, and now-iconic images, effortlessly present as idyllic portraits of Montauk, offering an idealized glimpse into the lives of the denizens who comprise the hamlet’s surfing subculture. The 10th anniversary edition, a limited Art Edition, is perfect for collectors or homeowners intent on wowing summer guests. It comes packaged in a clothbound clamshell box, numbered and signed by the author for $3,000. Don’t dilly dally, though, The End has a limited print run of only 300 copies. Visit ditchplainpress.com to order.