Is the coffee-table book doomed? Michael Hall's choice of art books for Christmas suggests that this season publishers have invested more in the text than in lavish production values

Having made a decision that this selection of art books for Christmas would not include exhibition catalogues, it soon became evident that the resulting list consisted of books to read rather than to look at. This year there is a dearth of lavishly illustrated blockbusters--there is not so much as a single survey of world painting in 834 pages. Is the coffee-table book a threatened species?

Even my favourite illustrated book of the season, Hockney's Pictures (Thames & Hudson, 19.95 [pounds sterling]), which has over 300 illustrations and virtually no text, is modest in format and light in the hand--at any rate there is no need to evoke the art-book reviewer's favourite companion, the kitchen scales. This is a virtually complete retrospective of Hockney's career; as selected by the artist, and the pictures are not only wonderfully well reproduced but are also perfectly served by the harmonious layout by Maggi Smith (who carried out APOLLO'S recent redesign).

Having made a rule in the first paragraph, I break it in the third, but it was well after I had been seduced by Vasemania (Yale University Press, 40 [pounds sterling]) that I realised that it was in fact the catalogue of this summer's tenth anniversary exhibition at New York's Bard Graduate Center for studies in decorative arts. It is a brilliantly simple idea: drawn exclusively from the resources of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the book charts the fascination with Greek vases in European art and design in the half century or so after the publication in 1767-76 of the catalogue of Sir William Hamilton's collection. interior decoration, textiles, furniture, silver and ceramics demonstrate the extraordinarily inventive use made of the vase motif by designers and craftsmen, from Wedgwood to Sevres and from Gouthi6re to Boulton. Both visually and intellectually stimulating (but too slim for the coffee table), this book deserves to be the first in a series based on the dissemination of other protean motifs.

Such an approach would be an intriguing parallel to Thames & Hudson's brave new series 'Art Works'. These densely illustrated square paperbacks are described as 'exhibitions in book form', bringing together illustrations and commentary that focus on themes and concepts of interest to contemporary artists. The first two volumes, Autobiography by Barbara Sterner and Jun Yang, and Money by Katy Siegel and Paul Mattick (each 14.95 [pounds sterling]) carry off their challenging brief with great flair. I was particularly drawn to Money, which tackles a controversial theme: the relationship of art to commerce, as dealt with by artists themselves.

Seeing the world through artists' eyes is also the aim of Irving Sandler's memoir A Sweeper-up after Artists (Thames & Hudson, 18.95 [pounds sterling]). Sandier, the author of the best-known history of post-war American painting, gives a detailed autobiographical account of his life as a scholar and critic in New York's art world in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing in particular on his own generation, the second wave of abstract expressionists. Almost as soon as he discovered contemporary art, in a revelatory encounter with Franz Kline's paintings at MOMA in the early 1950s, Sandier took on the role of a Boswell of art. New York's art world in the mid century has been as heavily memorialised and romanticised as Second Empire Paris or London of the Bloomsbury Group, but Sandier scores simply because nobody was as diligent as he in meeting and talking to everybody who mattered, from Pollock and Oldenburg downwards. This occasionally gives a rather Pooterish tincture to his prose: 'In the summer of 1961, upon arriving in London, I telephoned the critic Lawrence Alloway and asked for the names and phone numbers of English artists I was not familiar with ... I visited all of them and was invited to dinner with most. The notes l took of our conversations are the primary record of this critical moment in English art history.' Such solemnity demonstrates a reverence for art that often amused the artists whom he describes.

A charge of solemnity could never be visited on Simon Schama, whose prose glitters with humour. Hang-ups: Essays on Painting (Mostly) (BBC Books, 30 [pounds sterling]) is a collection of his journalism on art from 1978 up to a 2003 New Yorker article on Andy Goldsworthy. Simon Schama is a member of a species that used to be much more common, a scholar who is also a very good journalist. He has his specialities, and writes with particular authority on Dutch Golden Age art, but what gives real substance to this collection is the recurrence of certain themes, notably an interest in national and racial identity. He writes well about Jewishness and Chaim Soutine, about German-ness and Anselm Kiefer and about Englishness and Stanley Spencer. His long review of the 'Circa 1492' exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington, is a brilliantly funny attack on its curators' 'principle of Least Offence': 'Exquisite care is taken not to commit any act of vulgar Enrocentricity or to cast aspersions on non-European cultures by suggesting that, like the Judaeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions, they too, may have had their share of cruelty, narrow mindedness and fanaticism'.

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