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A select guide to great coffee-table books

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE WORLD By E.H. Gombrich (Yale University Press, 346 pages, $29.95) Although written for a younger audience, this is a good place to check your memory, or statements you want to make authoritatively about what happened when. This book, published in German in 1935, is delightfully non-pedantic and illustrated with maps and art (Gombrich, an art historian, penned The Story of Art in 1950).

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LEGO STAR WARS CHARACTER ENCYCLOPEDIA By Hannah Dolan (DK, 205 pages, $20.99) A compendium of Lego’s Star Wars mini-figures, divided into eight sections: Episodes I through IV, The Clone Wars and the Expanded Universe. Characters are shown as “versions” and “variants,” which are the same characters but with modifications. Luke Skywalker, for example, has 10 variants. The mini-figures are annotated and shown much larger than life size. A “must-have” for Star Wars fans or Lego enthusiasts.

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THE INCREDIBLE POP-UP BODY BOOK (DK, 32 pages, $27.99) Light-years ahead of the overlapping-laminate-page diagrams that for years were the most convenient way for young people to learn about the body, this pop-up offers three-dimensional models of organs and systems accompanied by text explaining their interactions. Aimed at the 10-to-16 set, the 1.2-metre (four-foot) mini-human comes complete with a pop-up skull, chest, movable limbs and plenty of flaps to explore your inner workings.

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THE LEGO IDEAS BOOK Unlock Your Imagination By Daniel Lipkowitz (DK, $27.99) Everyone who agrees Lego may just be the greatest toy ever will want this book to continue inspiring the Lego-lover in their life. It's loaded with tips and tricks for specific pieces, as well as for inspiration, structure, stability and making the most of your pieces. Sections cover planes, trains and automobiles, boats, homes, furniture, public buildings, farm life, bridges, castles, spaceships, scooters, moon walkers and, of course, aliens.

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THE NOT-FOR-PARENTS TRAVEL BOOK By Michael Dubois, Katri Hilden and Jane Price (Lonely Planet, 208 pages, $21.99) This colourful and engaging volume will take school-age readers around the world in 200 pages, with a snapshot of every country on the planet, from Andorra to Zimbabwe. It’s the kind of trivia (epic events! amazing animals! funky foods!) that makes preparing for a geography project a lot more fun to do with a book than with boring old Wikipedia.

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3-D DINOSAUR By John Woodward (DK, 72 pages, $19.99) Tired of the average two-dimensional tyrannosaurus? This is a guide to a downloadable program that will help prehistoric creatures of all sorts pop to life in three dimensions. Watch how they lived and loved for more than 100 million years. Children in the dinosaur-mania stage will thank you.

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3-D HUMAN BODY By Richard Walker (DK Books, 72 pages, $19.95) This hyper-coloured, in-depth and up-close book on the body starts at the very beginning with a stunning photograph of an ovum, magnified to a size of a soccer ball. From there, it’s a dizzying jaunt down vocal cords, into the nervous system and into our very bowels. Text boxes and diagrams make anatomy lessons more fun.

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TOP SECRET Shady Tales of Spies and Spying By Laura Buller et al. (DK, $21.99) Have a nosy parker on your hands? Nurture her natural instincts by introducing her to the world of espionage. Top Secret sets out the reasons for intelligence gathering, who watches who and why, and explains what leads people to become spies (ideology, money, ego), how they work, the history of spying, and the legality and morality of espionage.

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