Coffee-Table Books and the 19th-Century Culture of the Drawing-Room Book

peer-reviewed article

Aleksandra Fedorowicz-Jackowska

a.fedorowicz-jackowska@ispan.pl
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Science (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6685-010X

Abstract

The fashion for displaying books on tables of all kinds has a long history, as has the book itself as a decorative object. In the 19th century, drawing-room books – the historical equivalent of today’s coffee-table books, the lavishly illustrated, large-format books designed to be viewed and browsed through rather than read – served both a decorative and a social function, delighting guests and providing entertainment. They included illustrated books, music albums, photographic albums, almanacs and fashion magazines, as well as non-illustrated books such as tastefully bound editions of the Bible, historical works, classic novels, and poetry. In the article, I try to show that in the 19th century, unlike in coffee-table books of today, neither illustration – e.g. photographic illustration – nor general aesthetic value alone turned a publication into a book for salons, that is, a book that was displayed outside the places traditionally assigned to it, such as a bookcase, desk or library. The article introduces a new research topic – the popular 19th-century book as a table and drawing-room ornament, and draws attention to the importance of this type of publication in broader research on the culture of the period.



Keywords:

drawing-room book, album, coffee-table book, Salonbuch, livre de salon, photography, 19th century, material culture, book history

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Published
2025-07-16

Cited by

Fedorowicz-Jackowska, A. (2025). Coffee-Table Books and the 19th-Century Culture of the Drawing-Room Book. Biuletyn Historii Sztuki, 87(2), 75–100. https://doi.org/10.36744/bhs.4116

Authors

Aleksandra Fedorowicz-Jackowska 
a.fedorowicz-jackowska@ispan.pl
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Science Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6685-010X

Aleksandra Fedorowicz-Jackowska is an art historian, graphic designer and researcher of 19th-century book culture and illustration. She graduated from the University of Warsaw and the Universiteit Utrecht. In 2022 she received a doctorate in humanities from the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Nieuznana rewolucja? Polskie książki i fotografia (1856–1883) (Warsaw 2023) and co-author (with Ewa Manikowska, Kamila Kłudkiewicz, Wojciech Walanus and Marzena Woźny) of Porządek dziedzictwa w XIX wieku. Polskie pojęcia i wyobrażenia (Warsaw 2023).



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