By Anne Stephenson
The Arizona Republic

In what Publishers Weekly called "a concession to market realities," National Geographic, a venerable source of handsome coffee-table books, recently published its biggest single-volume collection of photographs ever - and priced it at just $30.

That's a pretty good value, given the publishing tradition of releasing expensive, oversize books just as holiday shoppers begin making their lists.

Through the Lens: National Geographic Greatest Photographs, which includes 504 pages and 250 images from the Geographic archive (the earliest was taken in 1906), is a walk down memory lane with the magazine that for more than a century has afforded armchair travelers a window on the world. But does its reasonable price tag signal a trend? Have other publishers found ways to publish big books at not-so-big prices?

Let the consumer decide. Here's a look at what's new, notable and waiting for you in bookstores this holiday season:

Beyond by Michael Benson (Abrams; $55). Most picture books offer photographs taken by humans, but these breathtaking images were taken by robots. Magnificent pictures of asteroids, the sun, the planets and their moons have been sent to Earth over the past four decades by interplanetary probes. Many of them are reproduced here with a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke and a thought-provoking essay by Lawrence Weschler. As coffee-table books go, it's one of the best - you'll look at it again and again.

Pro Football's Heroes of the Hall by Ron Smith (Sporting News; $29.95). Smith, a Sporting News senior editor, celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Pro Football Hall of Fame with short profiles of its members, including Joe Greene, Jim Brown, Vince Lombardi, Joe Montana, Johnny Unitas, Pete Rozelle and more than 200 others. With a foreword by former St. Louis Cardinal Dan Dierdorf.

My Fellow Americans by Michael Waldman (Sourcebooks; $45). Waldman, chief speechwriter during the Clinton administration, chooses the greatest speeches by American presidents. Included are two CDs with the voices of every president since Benjamin Harrison, and re-enactments of speeches delivered before the age of audio recording. David Gergen contributed the foreword and George Stephanopoulos narrates the CDs.

100 Suns by Michael Light (Knopf, $45). From the man who created 1999's "Full Moon" comes another stunner, one that disturbs even as it enthralls. Light has assembled 100 color and black and white photographs of nuclear tests conducted from 1945 to 1962. The images, taken at the moments of detonation, are from the archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Archives. The clouds, shapes and colors are nothing less than spectacular, and in their troubling beauty we see exactly what mass destruction looks like. The presentation is stark, in deference to the subject. Each image is accompanied only by the name of the test, its yield in kilotons or megatons, the date and location.

Medal of Honor by Peter Collier (Artisan; $40). Miniprofiles of men who have won the Medal of Honor, including Frederick E. Ferguson, Nathan G. Gordon, Silvestre S. Herrera, Leo K. Thorsness and the late Joseph J. Foss of Arizona will inspire you. Photographic portraits by Nick Del Calzo are a bit arty. With a foreword by former President George H.W. Bush and essays by Sen. John McCain and newsman Tom Brokaw.

Plant Discoveries by Sandra Knapp (Firefly; $60). More profiles, this time of plants and flowers. Knapp, a botanist with London's Natural History Museum, cautions that this is not a guide to plant history or identification, but "a voyage through the history of my science." The text is accompanied by gorgeous paintings and drawings, mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries. The book is a tribute to early botanical illustrators (short biographies are included) and the beauty of their subjects.

Horses by Michael Eastman (Knopf; $45). Jane Smiley and William H. Gass write introductions to this book, and you know they're horse-lovers by the way they describe their favorite Eastman photographs. There are 118 pictures here, with no text at all, once Smiley and Gass are finished - just horses, running, rolling in the dirt, playing with one another, regarding the camera with a practiced eye.

The Artist's Palate by Frank Fedele (DK; $30). One of artist Willem de Kooning's favorite meals was a fried-chicken TV dinner, which should tell you that the charm of this book is in its premise and not necessarily in the food. It's a collection of the "favorite personal recipes" of famous artists, which in M.C. Escher's case is nothing more bohemian than milk toast and in Man Ray's, a simple eggplant spread. Lee Krasner offers a recipe for Cheese Hominy Puffs, and Roy Lichtenstein's wife contributes Spaghetti with Broccoli Rabe, which we assume Roy liked. Fedele supplies modern recipes that would have suited the tastes of Michelangelo or Diego Rivera, but from Norman Rockwell he got the real thing - a signed recipe for oatmeal cookies.

Grateful Dead: The Illustrated Trip (DK, $50). The folks at DK quote Mark Twain at the outset of this hefty tribute, which seems a bit odd, but where else would oddness be more at home than in a book about the Grateful Dead? The unifying thread through its 469 busy pages is a timeline that traces the band's 30 years together, month by month, ending with the summer of 2003. Crammed onto the pages are photos, anecdotes, ticket stubs, trivia, quotes and anything even remotely connected to the group. Deadheads will be stoked. With a foreword by Robert Hunter.

Extraordinary Pigeons by Stephen Green-Armytage (Abrams, $24.95). This isn't such a big book, but its subjects are grand and they know it. The birds seem confident and savvy as they preen like supermodels for the camera, but Green-Armytage says many actually were quite nervous and there was "a frequent need for me to clean or replace the surfaces on which they stood." His earlier book, "Extraordinary Chickens," was a dumbfounding success, and we suspect these birds will find admirers, too.

Winged Migration by Jacques Perrin (Chronicle; $50). This book was inspired by the success of the Oscar-nominated documentary of the same name. Both show the results of four years Perrin and his team of moviemakers and ornithologists spent following birds through the mysterious process of migration. The book doesn't have the magic of the movie, but it includes a section on how the film was made. Perrin describes a moment after his cameras captured a flight of barnacle geese: "Radiant, tears in their eyes, the operators looked at me without a word. What they had just filmed had suddenly rendered their technical mastery meaningless. All that mattered for them was that birds in flight had taken them into their confidence."

War: USA Afghanistan Iraq (de.MO; $96). The powerful photographs in this huge and unwieldy book were taken by members of VII Photo Agency, formed in 2001 by seven photojournalists who specialize in covering world conflicts. Their belief that a picture is worth many words is obvious. Captions are presented in minuscule type that runs vertically (you have to turn the book sideways to read them) and biographies of the contributors are all but unreadable. If you're smart, you'll concentrate on the images, which eloquently convey the terror of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Story of the West edited by Robert M. Utley (DK, $40). A panel of historians traces the West from prehistory to the present day. Generously illustrated in the DK way. Created in association with the Smithsonian Institution.

The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson. (Oxford, $65). McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War is enhanced with photographs, maps, period cartoons, etchings, woodcuts and paintings.

The Encyclopedia of Surfing by Matt Warshaw (Harcourt, $40). You don't have to live near an ocean to get caught up in the stories in this thorough, well-written book, mainly because so many of surfing's great achievers also have been nonconformists, interesting men and women who were competitive and happy to live on the edge. Warshaw covers everything from the birth of (beginitalic)Gidget (enditalic)to the 1994 death of Hawaiian big-wave rider Mark Foo to the statistical rarity of shark attacks like the one that recently cost a 13-year-old surfer her arm. Despite the sport's reputation for danger, Warshaw says, its actual injury rate is "similar to that of fishing and well below that of cheerleading."

America 24/7 (DK, $50). Creators Rick Smolen and David Elliot Cohen call this an "exuberant democracy of images," a visual time capsule made during the week of May 12-18, 2003, by 25,000 professional and amateur photographers across the United States. All used digital cameras, and amateurs submitted their photos to a Web site for the selection process. The book is fun to look through once, but it's not worth the hype it has received.

Nature, Form & Spirit by Mira Nakashima (Abrams, $75). This book traces the life and career of the author's father, acclaimed furniture and building designer George Nakashima, who often said that his work gave trees a second life. After leaving a Japanese internment camp in Idaho in 1943, Nakashima and his family settled in New Hope, Pa., where he opened his craft-furniture business and made his name. His creations are serene, elegant and full of life. Each, his daughter writes, was "meant to be lived with as a member of the family, full of imperfections as we all are. If properly lived with, it becomes a tangible chronicle of people's lives as it ages."

Portraits: A History by Andreas Beyer (Abrams, $125). No bargain here, but who wouldn't pay large sums to gaze at that fine gentleman on the cover? This is a 413-page history of Western portraiture, with more than 250 full-page reproductions of artworks created from the Middle Ages to the present.