The Best Summer Coffee Table Reads from TASCHEN

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Welcome to Beach Reads, the series that delivers page-turning picks for the dog days of summer.

Images Via Taschen

So Miami, we see you've been sneaking in a few books pages in between your daytime fetes and nightlife escapades. This May, Amazon listed our party town as the third most well-read city in America, and with a title like that it only makes sense to broaden our reading material by adding in some big, bold titles.

This week, we ducked into TASCHEN, a Lincoln Road bookshop that specializes in big, glossy, picture-heavy coffee table books. Here, Sandra Trapero, the store's manager, let us in on her perfect summer reads, and while they're not exactly beach proof, there's everything right about lounging about elsewhere whilst flipping through these beauties.

Fashion Designers A-Z by Valerie Steele: It's our limited edition and it comes numbered. It has the top fashion designers of the 20th and 21st century and their most iconic pieces, with a brief introduction to fashion history in the front. It was done for us by Valerie Steele, who is the fashion curator for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. It's beautiful, not only because it's a limited edition, but the quality of the paper is really luxurious. It comes in a beautiful acrylic case, and some designers have [designed] fabrics to cover the books, so you can choose if you want a Prada, Stella McCartney, Akris and Etro. The Dianne Von Furstenberg, we used to have two but we sold those right away

National Geographic. Around the World in 125 Years by Reuel Golden: This is something we published for Art Basel in December in honor of the 125th year anniversary of National Geographic. They divided each continent into three volumes. Each ones comes in a slip case and the slip case converts into a bookstand. What is special about this is that they opened their complete archives to us, so we were able to publish a lot of photographs that had never been published before.

100 Getaways Around the World by Margit J. Mayer: 2 volumes that come in slip case and has getaways around the world. It's fantastic because it transports you. You really do feel like you're traveling. It's organized in alphabetical order by where the hotels are around the world. This is fairly new, a couple of months old, and it's really beautiful. It's something simple for people who want something to look at.
· TASCHEN [Official Site]
· All Beach Reads Posts [Racked Miami]
· All Lincoln Road Posts [Racked Miami]

TASCHEN Store

1111 Lincoln Rd, Miami Beach, FL 33139