A selection of recent art books

With one or two exciting exceptions, almost all art books fall into a very limited number of easily identified categories, such as the monograph and the exhibition catalogue. In some cases, of course, they cunningly manage to be both, not least since the authors of some exhibition catalogues seem to feel that the last thing they want to do is to provide a simple guide to the material for visitors to their show.

A case in point is The Early Dürer by Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser (Thames & Hudson, £40), which is brim-full of cutting-edge and often revisionist scholarship, but is written by specialists for specialists. Moreover, given that it weighs in at over 600 pages, even Arnold Schwarzenegger would probably prefer to read it in the comfort of his own home, rather than lug it round a gallery. As it happens, an altogether better bet for the general reader is Dürer by Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Phaidon, £17.95),