Coffee table book
A coffee table book is an oversized, usually hard-covered book intended for display on a table. It is often non-fiction and pictorial, with pages consisting of photographs and illustrations, captions, and small blocks of text. The concept of a book intended for display over perusal was mentioned by Michel de Montaigne in his 1581 essay  and Laurence Sterne in his 1759 novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. In the late 1940s, publisher Albert Skira and a few others began producing large folio and quarto format art books, illustrated with tipped-in color plates. David Brower is sometimes credited with inventing the modern coffee table book.