As for so many other things, I blame my parents: they planted the seed of my hunger for books—especially art and design books—with a Christmas present. When I was eight or nine, growing up in a small town in Georgia, a big box under the tree held nothing but a small card welcoming me as a member of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In those days MoMA assumed that members who lived more than a couple of hundred miles from Manhattan would seldom get to the museum, so in compensation those remote members were sent a clothbound catalogue of each exhibition. I read each one over and over, thinking all of them wonderful. I still have every one and they have a special place in my heart, even though my friend Paul Vieyra and I now have a library of roughly 12,000 books on art, architecture, design, and decorative arts.

It has been a pleasant pastime to remember which of these many books seemed important when I first read them and which seem as if they might still be important to younger readers. The list below has deliberately eliminated those books that show the current style, the latest fashion, or the “looks” of the “hot” designers. These have their uses, of course, but I have been interested in identifying some books with less transient values.