Dr. Boli’s Lavishly Illustrated Folio History of the Coffee Table. Perhaps the world’s most inconvenient piece of furniture, the coffee table was a fixture of suburban living rooms in the bygone days of the middle twentieth century. In this nostalgic look back at the ranch houses and split-levels of yore, Dr. Boli traces the mysterious origins of the coffee table in the pseudo-orientalism of the late Victorian era, through the age of modern design and into the early days of postmodernism. A special chapter on the medical aspects of coffee-table design details the many forms of knee and shin injuries frequently reported during the heyday of the coffee table’s popularity. The illustrations in this generously sized volume are so delightful, and the binding so attractive, that you will certainly want to leave this book out for your guests to admire, perhaps laid open on some sort of low, flat surface. Folio, 328 pp.