Standing in stark contrast to flashbulbed celebrity royalty are the sleepy interiors by the 19th-century Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi found in Hammershøi (The Royal Academy; $75). Although a 1998 exhibition at the Guggenheim did much to bolster the painter’s reputation Stateside, his haunting depictions of men and women quietly existing had not been surveyed in the U.K. in more than 20 years when the Royal Academy gave him a show last summer. This exhibition catalogue reproduces Hammershøi’s paintings in an appropriately no-frills manner, typically displaying one dusky image per white page. The artist’s ability to recast scenes of everyday life as haunting provinces of mystery speaks for itself.

Domestic themes continue in Mary Cassatt: Prints and Drawings from the Collection of Ambroise Vollard (Adelson Galleries and Marc Rosen Fine Art; $50). The book focuses on the engravings, etchings and sketches by the celebrated Impressionist, who favored printmaking from 1890 until her death in 1926. Vollard, a dealer more usually associated with Cassatt’s male counterparts, was an ardent supporter of her prints and amassed more than 300 of them in his lifetime. The catalogue, which accompanied a show at New York’s Adelson Galleries, breaks down the creative process of this queen of the quotidian, allowing the reader to follow several of her pictures as they evolve from primitive outlines to polychrome masterpieces.

The history of printing gets its due in The Printed Picture (MoMA; $60), a catalogue for the exhibition of the same name which runs through June 2009 at MoMA. It is based on a lecture series that Richard Benson, the former dean of the Yale School of Art, has been delivering over the past decade about his personal hoard of images on paper. Benson’s collection—a motley mix ranging from the 15th-century woodcut with which he begins his chronological survey to a machine-generated barcode—awakens a sense of wonder at picturemaking and its products. He fears that technology is expelling the human hand from a process that essentially began with hieroglyphs scratched onto a cave wall.

Those who appreciate the parchment of centuries past will also worship at the altar of the Macclesfield Psalter (Thames & Hudson; $90), a 14th-century book of psalms that resurfaced in 2004. The buzz surrounding the manuscript crescendoed the following year when the Getty and Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum battled over it; the British institution ultimately triumphed, paying a cool £1.7 million ($2.7 millon). Thames & Hudson has reproduced the Psalter’s pages in their original size, binding them with canvas and placing the whole inside a matching slipcase. The half-human monsters, sword-bearing sadists and Bacchic hooligans that grace the text’s borders enliven the book’s Latin verses, incarnating the medieval imagination in all its dark and twisted glory.

Another replica of a relic, this one from the modern era, made its way to the presses this year on the occasion of John McCracken’s fall show of Conceptual sculpture at David Zwirner. John McCracken Sketchbook (Radius; $75) is a reprint of the notebook of drawings that the artist kept in 1964. It includes Neville Wakefield’s interview with McCracken, which the renowned curator opens by calling the sketchbook a Rosetta Stone, as the text unlocks the mind of a creator who otherwise leaves no trace of himself in his minimal, primary-colored sculptures.

The colors red, white and blue are the concern of three exceptional photography books whose stark imagery calls into question the fundamentals of the American dream, economic and otherwise. Michael Eastman’s Vanishing America (Rizzoli; $40) is a brilliant eulogy to the diners, doughnut shops and drive-ins of the mid-20th century, filled with nostalgia-inducing shots of decaying small towns. In Meadowlands (Powerhouse; $50), the photographer Joshua Lutz exposes the urban sprawl that paved over the Main Streets of yore: backyards squeezed together like sardines, a deserted New Jersey Transit bus stop flanked by a pitiful smattering of trees, and a cookie-cutter mansion with a bulldozer still in the driveway. Completing this haunting trilogy is Beneath the Roses (Harry N. Abrams; $60), devoted to Gregory Crewdson’s often unsettling but always beautiful C-prints. His shots of estranged homemakers and their lonely domains may hit on the worn-out theme of warped suburbia, but the astounding complexity of the baroque sets he constructs for each image makes his work unique.