Nov. 18, 2000 — It all started with the Civil War.

In 1990, Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward's $75 back-breaker The Civil War: An Illustrated History, a companion to the popular documentary TV series, surprised book- industry watchers by zooming up bestseller lists. Because of the Burns/Ward book, "what coffee-table books are, and how they're perceived by shoppers, changed," says recently retired publishing-industry analyst Kenneth Kirkland. "They're no longer considered pretentious eye candy, the kind of thing you display rather than read."

The Civil War's unprecedented sales success, seconds Knopf associate publisher/vice president Patricia Johnson, "proved to us that if the book was right, we could do things like have color throughout, have the number of pages necessary to have high-quality text, charge $60 or $65 or $75 and still have a huge market."

Now all the major publishers are on the lookout for a so-called coffee-table book that can make the jump to the sales big time. About 5,000 oversized books are published in hardcover by major American companies each year. Here are the Star-Telegram's picks of the best of 2000.

1. The Beatles Anthology by the Beatles (Chronicle Books, $60): It has dominated best-seller lists for all five weeks it has been in bookstores, and that's as it should be. This is the best book about the Beatles that has ever been published, from exceptionally candid first-person contributions from Paul, George and Ringo to never- before-published photos from their private collections. This is one of the finest oversized books ever.

2. King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. by Charles Johnson and Bob Adelman (Viking Studio, $40): Sometimes pictures do tell the best story. Although the sparse text here is moving, the photos are much more so—such as a blurry two-page spread of three bottles of O-type blood kept handy at King's public appearances after he narrowly escaped a 1958 assassinations attempt in Harlem.

3. Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings by Pietro C. Marani (Abrams, $85): This book combines the best of old and new oversized book trends. The color photos are spectacular with the best showing us the modern decay of da Vinci's Last Supper. But the text alone is worth the hefty price; author Pietro Marani has written more than 100 books and articles about the artist and his era. When an expert was needed to oversee restoration of Last Supper, Marani was summoned.

4. Jazz: A History of American Music by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf, $65): In 1990, these two started the current coffee-table book trend of blending high-quality text with photos in The Civil War: An Illustrated History, which was based on Burns' PBS-TV series. Now there's another Burns multipart TV saga about the history of jazz, and another wonderful oversized book from Burns and Ward to go along with it. But Jazz stands alone as a superior book, whether or not you watch the TV series.

5. The Annotated Wizard of Oz, Centennial Edition by L. Frank Baum, edited and annotated by Michael Patrick Hearn (Norton, $39.95): Has it really been 100 years since readers first discovered Dorothy and chums following the Yellow Brick Road? Hearn does a masterful job here of adding all sorts of footnotes and insights to Baum's original text. Art by W.W. Denslow adds to the overall charm.

6. Roadside America: The Automobile and the American Dream by Lucinda Lewis (Abrams, $49.50): Here's a coffee-table book that may initially fool you. The photos are so gorgeous that they initially distract from Lewis' dead-on short essays that masquerade as extended captions. Did you know, for instance, that the 1959 Oldsmobile 88 Holiday Scenic Coupe was 9 inches wider and 10 inches longer than any previous car?

7. Jungles by Frans Lanting with Christine Eckstrom (Taschen, $39.95): Sometimes photos alone are enough to make an oversized book special. Lanting, properly acclaimed as one of the great nature photographers of our time, takes us so far inside a jungle world that you'll expect to find Tarzan peering over your shoulder. There are a few widely spaced blocks of basic text, but the pictures tell the story here.

8. Local Heroes: Changing America edited by Tom Rankin (Norton, $29.95): In seeking wonderful places and people, we often believe real heroes are only found far from our own neighborhoods. Local Heroes corrects that too-typical fallacy. Its series of first-person narratives (presenting both in text and on accompanying CD) introduce us to loggers who work to protect the environment, older women who join doctors to offer prenatal and postpartum support to indigent mothers, teen-agers who work with police to provide crisis counseling for younger kids, and much more.

9. Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem edited by Julian Bond and Sondra Kathryn Wilson (Random House, $29.95): Practically from the moment it was composed by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamind Johnson in 1900, Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing was widely considered "the Negro national anthem." In honor of its 100th anniversary, editors Julian Bond and Sondra Kathryn Wilson invited 100 prominent Americans—from Bill Cosby and Colin Powell to Lani Guinier and Quincy Jones—to contribute essays telling what the song has meant in their lives. Text here is accompanied by some of the most unsettling photos in memory, particularly a gang of white vigilantes posing by the bloody body of a black man lynched in 1936.

10. Art Nouveau 1890-1914 edited by Paul Greenhalgh (Abrams, $75): Again, here is a combination of stunning photographs and mesmerizing text. A series of reader- friendly essays complements gorgeous pictures of period art, sculpture, furniture and architecture. You'll alternately gaze and read for hours, and savor the memories afterward.