The books in the Art and Ideas series, which will cover everything from Fra Angelico to Frida Kahlo, are supremely pleasurable to read. Written by scholarly experts who know how turn a phrase and focus a gaze, the books are filled with hundreds of crisp, color reproductions that give purely visual pleasure and information. There have been many coffee-table books on Monet in the last two decades, for example, but the details in this Phaidon volume reveal more of his buttery, brilliant surfaces than many larger but less carefully reproduced pages. Their handy size, 6 1/4 by 8 1/2 inches, makes them easy to carry in a briefcase or backpack, and the text is printed in an easy-to-read typeface, with generous spacing. Even the time lines, biographies, and glossaries in the back are inviting to the eye. There will eventually be more than 100 volumes in the series, which is comparable to Thames and Hudson's World of Art series.

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