History
David R. Brower is sometimes credited with inventing the "modern coffee table book". While serving as executive director of the Sierra Club, he had the idea for a series of books that combined nature photography and writings on nature, with, as he put it, "a page size big enough to carry a given image’s dynamic. The eye must be required to move about within the boundaries of the image, not encompass it all in one glance." The first such book, "This is the American Earth", with photographs by Ansel Adams and others and text by Nancy Newhall, was published in 1960; the series became known as the "Exhibit Format" series, with 20 titles eventually published.
The concept of a book intended essentially for display over perusal was mentioned much earlier by Michel de Montaigne in his essay Upon Some Verses of Virgil, first published in 1580: "I am vexed that my Essays only serve the ladies for a common movable, a book to lay in the parlor window..." Almost two centuries later, Laurence Sterne in his 1759 comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman advanced the more lighthearted view that "As my life and opinions are likely to make some noise in the world, and... be no less read than the Pilgrim's Progress itself- and, in the end, prove the very thing Montaigne dreaded his Essays should turn out, that is, a book for a parlour window..."
They have also found uses in propaganda, such as a book on the life of East German leader Walter Ulbricht and another on Albanian leader Enver Hoxha.
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