Grey Modern Coffee Table – There you are. Sitting inside a living room or waiting room broke to accomplish. And there it really is. Sitting on one with the coffee tables is voluminous book you’ve seen so frequently before, full of lovely photos of classic cars, the Grand Canyon or moon. You can’t help yourself. You have to think about it.
Blame for the weakness for coffee table books. When David was the Executive Director with the Sierra Club, he or she must have observed a possibility within the 1960s when coffee tables could be present in every living room and waiting room in America. These large expanses of wood begged to be used by something more than coffee and David had the answer: The modern coffee table book. His first book, “This may be the American Earth,” instantly come to American coffee tables. Families which in fact had never even been aware of photographer Ansel Adams were suddenly enraptured by his work.
Soon after 20 editions of his “Exhibit Structure” collection had been printed, much more outsized guides flooded the marketplace. Books made for coffee tables ranged from photography and art to history, nature and entertainment. They all had something in common: Heavy on imagery and lightweight on content and that means you could easily thumb through them without becoming so enraptured which you forgot why you were seeing the book’s owner within the first place. The venerable coffee table book even became a piece of pop culture using the famous episode of “Seinfeld” when Kramer came up using the seemingly crazy concept of creating a coffee table book about coffee tables.
Today, you can still get coffee table books. But if these odes to grandeur and deforestation don’t grab you anymore, you can go modern day and luxuriate in them in an entirely different way. Coffee tables can rejoice inside a new found role, thanks to the advent of coffee table books on CD or DVD. Instead of an huge stack of books covering up every square in . of one’s table, you can enhance your laptop and luxuriate in these multimedia wonders, complete using the traditional text and photos as well as video.
Rather than thumbing through a 500-page book on The Civil War, you can enjoy a multimedia version detailed with video battle re-enactments, original correspondence between Lincoln and the generals and audio remembrances. It’s all inside a few disks that slip nicely in your coffee table’s drawers if not in use. Not only do you save several trees within the process, but, you actually have room on your own table to set coffee. And in case you really yearn for any book on coffee tables, you can come close. If you seek out “Seinfeld, coffee tables” around the Internet, you could just come across a unique DVD Gift Box containing every one of the episodes of Seinfeld inside a handsome collector’s box. Yes, you guessed it. In a nod to Kramer’s crazy idea, it’s shaped like a coffee table.