Books for Art Lovers - NYTimes.com Art books. Many of us can't live without them, but sooner or later we can't live with them, either. First we run out of shelves, then table space gets scarce, and soon stacks of books start rising from the floor. Luckily these conditions stop no one from publishing them, or from buying them or giving them as gifts. This year's offerings confirm once more the variety of genres that thrive beneath the art book banner. There are the standard artists" monographs, for example, among which Johannes Grave's "CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH" (Prestel, $120) stands out, primarily for its size and lavish reproductions - a total of 227, nearly all in color - of paintings, drawings and prints by this great German Romantic. It conveys a fuller sense of Friedrich's enigmatic, landscape-centered art than any single museum or exhibition could possibly provide. Mr. Grave's rather pedestrian text, while rich with interesting information and hypotheses about the works, never really gets going, but the pictures more than compensate. They could easily inspire a Friedrich pilgrimage to various, mostly German, museums. In the category of books by rather than about artists, one of the most stunning is Chris Ware's new graphic novel, "BUILDING STORIES" (Pantheon Books, $50), which elliptically tells the tale of a smart, fatalistic, unnamed young woman who happens to have a prosthetic leg, and of her search for love. As usual, Mr. Ware's style is a model of compression in both word and picture. Less usual, for the genre as a whole, is the vividness with which he limns his heroine's intense, if fairly ordinary, inner life, and also the brilliant way he avoids the visual relentlessness that can plague graphic novels. He accomplishes this last feat by spreading his story over "14 distinctively discrete books, booklets, magazines, newspapers and pamphlets," as the text on the illustrated box they come in puts it. Varying considerably in size, length and design, these entities offer no clues about sequence. The reader is left to piece together a multistrand narrative whose characters also include other residents of the Chicago brownstone in which the woman lives - an unhappily unmarried couple and the spinster landlady - as well as the building itself. The lack of clear structure, much less traditional linearity, turns reading into an unusually active process. This is a great, easily ownable work of art. Then there are books that offer a fresh and sweeping view of an entire lost culture. This is the case with "WARI: LORDS OF THE ANCIENT ANDES" (Cleveland Museum of Art/Thames & Hudson, $60), the thick, scholarly book published to accompany an apparently extraordinary exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art through Jan. 6. It will travel to the Museum of Art/Fort Lauderdale in Florida and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. The anthropomorphic ceramics and patterned textiles (abstract, figurative, abstractly figurative) produced during the Wari Empire (A.D. 600 to 1000) are staples of any museum display of pre-Columbian art. Nonetheless, the breadth of the cultural achievement of the Wari, who preceded the better-known Incas in the highlands of Peru, has never been so thoroughly demonstrated or explicated. Overseen by Susan E. Bergh, organizer of the exhibition and a curator at the Cleveland Museum, this lavishly illustrated, often breathtakingly beautiful book pulls together essays by more than a dozen scholars. Historical and geographical contexts are detailed, and there are essays covering architecture, religious deities and rituals, textiles and feather work, sculpture, and inlaid and metal ornaments. For a sense of the revelations in store, consider the full-page reproduction, on Page 144, of a Wari urn decorated with delicate and varied plant forms that presages American and European folk art motifs by several hundred years. Another volume that explores a far more familiar bit of art history and makes it fresh is "DRAWING SURREALISM," (DelMonico Books/Prestel, $60), the catalog to an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that will travel to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York in late January. The restless nature of Surrealist drawing - from hyper-realism to free-form automatism, with the collaborative exquisite corpse technique falling somewhere in between - is well established. Overseen (like the show) by Leslie Jones, a curator at the Los Angeles museum, and Isabelle Dervaux, of the Morgan, this invaluable book presents a profusion of unfamiliar works and, even better, unfamiliar talents from 15 countries around the globe. It reveals the truly international nature of Surrealism, enriching the understanding of this already richly polymorphous style. As for even more recent art history, it can be presented in many ways, including as an information-dense handbook. This is the case with "ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES: NEW YORK ART SPACES 1960 TO 2010" (MIT Press, $40), a kind of fleshed-out, multivoiced timeline of the city's alternative spaces. It was edited by Lauren Rosati and Mary Anne Staniszewski for a show at Exit Art, one of New York's greatest - and sadly now defunct - exemplars of the form.