NEW YORK, Nov 28 — Where books are concerned, I am something of an unreliable narrator — and only becoming more so. I love them as purveyors of knowledge, linguistic art and portable objects. I live among shelves and stacks of them. One pile is holding up my bedside table, which was a recent victim of book overload.

The problem is that I tend to start more books than I finish. My promiscuity may result from the forced skimming of exhibition catalogues on deadline, exacerbated by a short attention span. Also, for the art-centric, most art books are as important for their images as for their texts. Going through such volumes page by page — binge-looking — is a rewarding autodidactic pastime, a way to jump-start your familiarity with an artist’s work, a culture’s achievement or a specific art medium or genre. So the books recommended here are not ones that I have necessarily read word for word: They are volumes I am grateful to own, have learned from and will keep learning from.

Picasso Sculpture, Edited by Ann Temkin and Anne Umland; Museum of Modern Art; US$85 (RM362)

This fall’s crop of outstanding museum exhibitions has been accompanied by some equally exceptional publications. Topping my list is the Museum of Modern Art’s “Picasso Sculpture.” It appeals especially to those who search monographic catalogues primarily for the artist’s chronology. MoMA’s latest, hefty Picasso catalogue is nearly all chronology. Following the exhibition’s division, with each chapter headed by an introduction by Ann Temkin or Anne Umland, the show’s curators, this extravagant timeline is the work of Luise Mahler, an assistant curator at MoMA, and Virginie Perdrisot, curator of sculptures and ceramics at the Musée National Picasso, Paris, with Rebecca Lowery, a fellow in MoMA’s painting and sculpture department. Their impeccably detailed, heavily illustrated account proceeds work by work, tracking every aspect of Picasso’s involvement with sculpture, and includes photographs of his studios and of exhibitions of his efforts. Touch down almost at any point, and you’ll learn something new.

New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, Edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann; Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Delmonico Books/Prestel; US$75

Among the latest publications on German modernism — presently among one of art history’s most expansive areas — is this tightly focused volume accompanying an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through January 18). Its 14 essays examine from all sides the newly realistic painting style that sprang up in the wake of German Expressionism during the politically turbulent Weimar Republic. The multifarious style encompassed both radical and conservative strains and had a complex relationship to the period’s photography, which is also covered. Like the show, the catalogue features several little known, often female artists who worked in both mediums.

Berlin Metropolis: 1918-1933, Edited by Olaf Peters; Prestel/Neue Galerie, US$75

Neue Sachlichkeit and photography are only part of the “Berlin Metropolis” catalogue and its exhibition, which is at the Neue Galerie in New York through January 4, and broadly examines the artistic ferment of the Weimar period. Like “New Objectivity,” this catalogue is rich with essays by several contributors. Its wider, looser net also hauls in late German Expressionist paintings by Max Beckmann and Berlin Dada works by George Grosz and Hannah Hoch, as well as movies by Fritz Lang; architecture; and examples of fashion, graphic and industrial design. It effectively outlines the far-reaching visual culture of Germany’s first tragic attempt at democracy.

The Heroine Paint: After Frankenthaler, Edited by Katy Siegel; Gagosian Gallery; US$40

One of my favourite exhibition catalogues of the year is this small handbook-size paperback, published on the occasion of “Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler,” an innovative exhibition organized by Ms. Siegel at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., albeit published by the powerful New York gallery that represents the Frankenthaler estate. Replete with several essays as well as artists’ statements, and inclusive of diverse mediums, this handy volume largely accomplishes what its cover line promises — “Stains, flows, decoration, play ambition: a different account of painting from the 1950s to the present day.”

Making It Modern: The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman, By Margaret K. Hofer and Roberta J.M. Olson; New-York Historical Society Museum & Library/D Giles, US$65

This catalogue, and the exhibition that occasions it, chronicles a grand collecting passion while examining one of the cornerstones of folk art study in the United States: the holdings amassed by the Polish-American sculptor Elie Nadelman and his wife, Viola Spiess Flannery, between the world wars. Ranging through six centuries and across 13 countries, it ultimately numbered  15,000 objects, many of which were displayed and open to the public at the Nadelmans’ Riverdale estate in the Bronx. In 1937, its nucleus was purchased by the New-York Historical Society, which has organized the show. The catalogue details the couple’s acquisitions — including a list of the dealers they bought from and a map of those in Manhattan — and examines their influence on some of Nadelman’s best work. It also includes an essay by their granddaughter, art critic Cynthia Nadelman. The exhibition, at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History through Nov. 29 and coming to New York in May, should delight; its catalogue presents a vanished world.

Texas Clay: 19th-Century Stoneware Pottery From the Bayou Bend Collection, By Amy Kurlander; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; US$26.95

Books and catalogues that plunge us into unknown corners of familiar mediums can be thrilling, as exemplified by the highly concentrated “Texas Clay,” which accompanied a recent exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston drawn from its Bayou Bend Collection and highlights a large recent gift. It records some 180 examples of plain-spoken stoneware jugs, jars, churns and pitchers made between 1850 and 1880 in different counties and regions in Texas, representing around 80 potteries and individual potters. Their utilitarian simplicity and alkaline, salt or slip glazes can evoke the random drips and speckles of Japanese ash-glaze ceramics.

Object Lessons: The Visualisation of Nineteenth-Century Life Sciences, By George Loudon; with Lynne Cooke and Robert McCracken Peck; Ridinghouse; US$36

This strange and handsome volume is primarily the work of George Loudon, a contemporary art collector from Britain who shifted his attention to acquiring the visual by-products of the explosion of scientific knowledge in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Reproduced and annotated here are his finds: all manner of zoological and botanical illustrations and models (in wax, glass and papier mâché) created by scientists, artists and artisans as pedagogical tools, as well as illustrated books. There are single specimens, notably conjoined piglets, and collections, including shells, ferns and lichen.

Eilshemius: Peer of Poet-Painters By Stefan Banz, JRP/Ringier, US$100

Weighing in at 9 pounds and 768 pages, Stefan Banz’s book about the American painter Louis M. Eilshemius (1864-1941) is as much grand obsession as monograph. It seems to reproduce in colour just about every known painting by this idiosyncratic, extremely prolific artist, who specialised in awkward nymphs and nudes in landscapes, was alternately ridiculed and admired by the New York art world and was a friend of Marcel Duchamp. It also seems to include all reviews of his art that ran in New York newspapers during his lifetime, along with a great many of his responses in letters to their editors. Banz, a Swiss artist and curator, is founder of the Marcel Duchamp Kunsthalle, a small dollhouse-like museum in the courtyard of the Forestay Museum in Cully, Switzerland. This book should probably similarly be considered a disguised work of art. Again cover lines are pertinent: “Collected Documents: A Novel of Facts by and About Louis M. Eilshemius and a Study of his Influence on Marcel Duchamp.”

Keep the Change: A Collector’s Tales of Lucky Pennies, Counterfeit C-Notes, and Other Curious Currency, By Harley J. Spiller, Princeton Architectural Press (New York); US$19.95

This is one of two slim volumes — Howard Akler’s “Men of Action” is the other — that I picked up initially because their slimness made them great candidates for subway reading, and then became riveted. Spiller, identified on the flap as a “museum professional,” is also known as an inveterate collector of the unnoticed — for example, Chinese menus. His latest book, which is beautifully written and designed, chronicles his collection, started at age 5, of damaged money, mostly bills and coins of the United States of America. His interest carries us, as it did him, into the world of coin collecting, a realm with its own terminology, quirky habits and venerated specialists. But he dissents from its codes and in so doing demonstrates collecting as a passion that can be satisfied many ways, more or less free, according to one’s own rules.

Men of Action, By Howard Akler; Coach House Books; US$13.95

Like Harley J. Spiller’s “Keep the Change,” Howard Akler’s “Men of Action” similarly compresses a great deal — whole lives — into a very few pages. Akler, a Canadian writer, began this memoir during his father’s decline and finished it after his death. As might be expected, “Men of Action” delves into the father-son relationship, while also encompassing the father’s life, the parents’ marriage and the son’s youth in Toronto, where Akler still lives. But its more submerged subject is the act of writing itself, which is demonstrated with the carefully observed, resonant economy of poetry. — New York Times