by Madonna (pictured'') is both the fastest-selling and best-selling coffee table book in publishing history. The concept of a book intended essentially for display over perusal was mentioned by
Michel de Montaigne in his 1581 essay "Upon Some Verses of Virgil": "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..." Beginning in the late 1940s, publisher
Albert Skira and a few others, such as Cailler and Editions Tisné, Éditions Mazenod, and
Harry N. Abrams, began producing large
folio and quarto (4to) format art books, illustrated with
tipped-in color plates, that were significant in the development of coffee table books as known today.
David 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 term "coffee table book" appeared in
Arts Magazine in 1961, and in the title of
The Coffee Table Book of Astrology, published in 1962. 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. As of 2011,
Madonna's 1992 book
Sex remained the most searched for out-of-print coffee table book. ==As media tie-in publications==