Stock up on art knowledge, and pretty books, with One Hundred Great Paintings, a new publication from Yale University Press and the National Gallery of Art, London. The highlighted works are tipped as “some of the most inspiring paintings ever.” Written by Louise Govier, the text is as lively as the works of art. Dip in for a single look or read cover to cover.

Available from Amazon.

New from Yale University Press, Alan Allport’s Demobbed: Coming Home After World War Two.

What happened when millions of British servicemen were “demobbed”—demobilized—after World War II? Most had been absent for years, and the joy of arrival was often clouded with ambivalence, regrets, and fears. Returning soldiers faced both practical and psychological problems, from reasserting their place in the family home to rejoining a much-altered labor force. Civilians worried that their homecoming heroes had been barbarized by their experiences and would bring crime and violence back from the battlefield. Drawing on personal letters and diaries, newspapers, reports, novels, and films, Alan Allport illuminates the darker side of the homecoming experience for ex-servicemen, their families, and society at large—a gripping story that’s in danger of being lost to national memory.

Allport is a postdoctoral lecturer at Princeton. His book is a must for all military history buffs, and those celebrating the good old days of mid-century America.

Available from Amazon.

Written by two Dutch folks (Bianca du Mortier and Ninke Bloemburg), Accessorize!: 250 Objects of Fashion & Desire takes readers on a highlighted tour of the Rijksmuseum’s fine collections of fashion accessories. Items range from wigs to walking sticks – with hats, shoes, and other familiar items thrown in for good measure. In a stroke of brilliance, the book is organized by color, which allows fascinating juxtaposition of fashions, materials, and time periods. The power of object is central throughout.

What, put off that some of the objects covered might be for women? Well, it seems given the recent fertilization of masculine fashions a spot of contextualization wouldn’t hurt anyone.

Published by Yale University Press. Pre-order now from Amazon.

In his freshly released (meaning today) book The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960, Richard Lognstreth traces the evolution of the department store from local, urban institutions to suburban entities. In this history, the shift of building types in the retail niche and the obvious socio-economic factors (car culture, competition, decentralization, etc) help form a comprehensive view of a dynamic topic.

His choice of time period works beautifully, coinciding with the above mentioned socio-economic factors and pulling the history of the department store beyond the “palace of urban leisure and consumption” model shops of the late 19th and early 20th-century operated under.

In essence, the book is as much about the changing look and feel of “Main Street America” as it is about retail.

Published by Yale University Press.

Available now from Amazon.

In our age of digital photo sharing, it is often easy to forget the origins of photography as a social enterprise. Elizabeth Siegel offers a comprehensive look at the development and origin of the 19th-century photo album in Galleries of Friendship and Fame. Her work is very much about self representation – something that should find juncture with your flickr or facebook account. It’s also about the confluence of commerce, technology, and the domestic sphere.

Grab a copy from YUP or Amazon.

Given a busy schedule (and our amazing professionalism), we missed out on some of the hedonistic diversions of Sin City. Given our exhaustion, we may leave our hedonistic pursuits back home this weekend to flights of fancy and book driven imagination.

Thomas M. Kavanagh’s new Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism pushes the notion that art and culture in 18th-century France promoted pleasure to the center of the cultural agenda. Did things go completely awry? No, rather than fall into the full trappings of hedonism the French manage to balance pleasure and incorporate individual well-being into the fabric of community.

May have managed to make pleasure sound like no fun there. Regardless, a potentially good weekend read.

From Yale University Press.

Available now from Amazon.

One can never go wrong with having a solid art survey on the book shelf. Published by Yale University Press and edited by Chris Stephens (this volume) and David Bindman (in total), The History of British Art covers a serious swath of artistic movement and canonical painters. Picking just one has obvious pitfalls, the full story is always great, but that said Volume 3: 1870-Now gives the basics on the complex role of art and artists in the history of Modern Britain. Plus, if contemporary is your thing, the story should allow some understanding of how we’ve arrived where we are now in the art world.

Available now from Amazon.

Despite the overindulgence of yesterday, food remains on the mind. But, thanks to this book, we can opt for intellectual rather than unneeded physical consumption. At some point in time, we’ve all enjoyed a bagel. Many of us have probably argued over where to find “the best.” They’ve been a conduit for lox, the base of an egg and cheese sandwhich and, perhaps, even an object of mystery. If the latter has peaked your interest, Maria Balinska’s The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread is for you. Balinska traces the bagels history from 17th century Poland to the American freezer through archival research and personal interview.

The book is available from Yale University Press. Feed your mind this Black Friday.

Felice Fisher is the Luther W. Brady Curator of Japanese Art and Curator of East Asian Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Art of Japanese Craft: 1875 to the Present is her most recent book. Within its pages, Fisher focuses attention on the diversity of media and technique in modern Japanese Craft. The work is exceptional as one of the first surveys of Japanese Craft, particularly contemporary craft, in English. Available now from Yale University Press.

The amount of material being published about China is staggering. For us, the books about design, art, architecture and branding are most relevant to our interests (those being how all those are tangled in cultural development. Art and China’s Revolution explores the countries artistic output from the 1950s to the 1970s (art under Mao if you will). There is an intent to refocus this output as more than mere progaganda art, and situate the work as important precursor to the current swell of contemporary art in China.

Edited by Melissa Chiu and Zhen Shengtian, the book was released last week by Yale University Press.