The Coffee Table

Jay’s Journal of Anomalies: Conjurers, Cheats, Hustlers, Hoaxters, Pranksters, Jokesters, Imposters, Pretenders, Sideshow Showmen, Armless Calligraphers, Mechanical Marvels, Popular Entertainments(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 216 pages, $40)not only carries an impossible title but includes the complete, 16-issue set of the quarterly publication by the same name. Author and sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay provides the historical background behind fringe entertainments of the past — freak-show attractions and popular sideshow tricks such as “giant children” and “nose amputations” — and then describes how these illusions were realized. The Journal, illustrated with 19th-century woodcuts, hand-colored engravings, antique playbills and posters from Jay’s own collection, makes a nice companion to his earlier book, Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women. Another survey of the strange is Images From the World Between: The Circus in 20th Century American Art(MIT Press, 184 pages, $40), a stunning collection of more than 90 circus images found in contemporary art, from Diane Arbus’ voluptuous sword-swallowing albino woman to Kimberly Gremillion’s black-and-white abstract of a trapeze artist in midair, to Charles and Ray Eames’ eerie video stills of clown faces. A lush, vibrant contribution to the gorgeous and the grotesque “literature of the circus.”

The Last Dream-O-Rama

Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag(Last Gasp, 96 pages, $25) is a poppy, colorful paperback showcasing the distinctive illustrations of notorious swank scenester Shag (a.k.a. local artist Josh Agle). The cartoonish, space-age-pop images of swinging singles, lounge lizards, beatniks and hipsters sucking down mai tais and martinis seem omnipresent on T-shirts and post cards in L.A., and in fact the book doeshave a section of high-end “Shag Schwag” merchandise: tiki-bar stools and handbags, silk-screened pro-model skateboards, and tiki lamps with handmade paper shades. (See the Shag show at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Feliz in January.) If Shag could drive, he’d probably hook up with New Yorkerillustrator-writer Bruce McCall, whose hilarious The Last Dream-O-Rama: The Cars Detroit Forgot To Build, 1950–1960(Crown, 123 pages, $25) pokes fun at the political and social ideals of the ’50s through comic illustrations of dream cars and accompanying text. The tailor-made fantasies-on-wheels include a car designed specifically for Hollywood agents, the “Glamoramic Polo Lounger Funtop, 1954,” complete with a blinding-white toothy grin on the front grille and a convertible top that looks like a Brylcreemed hairpiece; the “Armageddon Mk1, 1958,” a “fallout shelter on wheels” equipped with an anti-radiation shield and canned bologna in the trunk; and the “Bumsmobile Gold Rush Express, 1958,” featuring built-in spittoons and topped by an L.A. Dodgers cap that electronically tips forward for pretty women.

From the ridiculous to the sublime: The World From Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles(Getty Publications, 464 pages, $60)is a beautiful clothbound hardcover catalog (released in conjunction with the UCLA Hammer Museum show of the same name, up through January 13) that highlights priceless objects and artifacts from 30-some different L.A. libraries — rare books, maps, annotated Hollywood film scripts and opera manuscripts among them — as a way of paying homage to the amazing depth of special-collections material available in this city. As intriguing as it is impressive. The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century(Roth Horowitz, 320 pages, $85), handsomely compiled by writer and rare-book expert Andrew Roth, presents a spread on each of the acclaimed books, with excerpted artwork. It also includes six critical essays by experts and artists such as Vince Aletti, Neville Wakefield and Shelley Rice, who writes: “The study of photography books from the 20th century is not a simple exercise in art appreciation but a tale of our terrors, confrontations, repressions and resolutions — of our attempts to assimilate one hundred years of historical change, to calm the quaking of our social and personal lives, to decipher the whisperings of ‘things that dream and talk in their sleep.’”

Finally, a few bedside-table books that may make you talk in your sleep. Peepshow: 1950s Pin-Ups in 3-D(St. Martin’s Press, 96 pages, $25) is a small, candy-pink hardcover with 3-D glasses embedded in the cover that presents the best stereoscopic photography from that decade. The 48 full-color “cheesecake shots” evoke a nostalgic sexual standard: clean-cut and curvy near-naked sailor girls, buxom farm girls resting in tall grass, creamy bathing beauties with red lips and red nails. The requisite shots of Bettie Page were taken by model-turned-photographer Bunny Yeager, who also wrote the introduction. For those who like to watch, each of Nerve Magazine photographer Leslie Lyons’ playful, pocket-size erotic-photo flipbooks, Strip Flips(PowerHouse Books, 128 pages, $11 each), features a different female — Anna, Susan or George — performing a saucy, old-fashioned striptease.

Exquisite Mayhem

Exquisite Mayhem: The Spectacular and Erotic World of Wrestling(Taschen, 480 pages, $60)combines athletics, theater, porn and kitsch. L.A. photographer Theo Ehret has been chronicling the exploits of voluptuous, Russ Meyer–style female “apartment wrestlers,” who have gone at it in skimpy bikinis or nothing at all (“faster pussycat, pin, pin”) since the 1970s. His new, voyeuristic collection, co-edited by artists Mike Kelley and Cameron Jamie with an essay from “mythologies” by French critic Roland Barthes, leads the reader on a tour through this outrageous erotic subculture. The large-format photos are paired with Ehret’s more journalistic, testosterone-charged photos of real pro wrestlers, and the humorous juxtaposition illuminates the inherent cinema of sports spectacles — both real and fabricated.