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The most lavish and expensive art books produced in British Columbia this decade cannot be bought in any bookstore. Cloth-bound in linen, with stitched signatures of oversize colour pages, and set into handsome slip-case boxes, these books are produced to the highest graphic design and publishing standards, sometimes running $100 apiece for printing costs alone. Alas, these books will never make it into any library.

This is because what they celebrate has nothing to do with sculpture, painting, installation art, or even the art of writing itself. The art these spectacular volumes illustrate and describe is real estate. Especially for high-end housing projects, the mere brochure — no matter how glossily printed — is no longer enough. Project-by-project, B.C.'s top-drawer real estate has been booked.

The reasons for this turn says volumes about how the creation and marketing of condos is now at the dead centre of west coast culture, as it is almost exclusively apartments-for-sale that are the subjects of these weighty tomes.

To start with, these are — in the most literal sense possible — coffee table books. They are totems for display, tchotchkes of acquisition, status and prestige compiled for all to see, a housing development eternalized by being set on slick-coated paper. These books are designed to be conspicuous in even the most ostentatious living room, just the thing to place beside the orchid arrangement or the Peruvian antiquities. The hope is that guests might take a peek at their pages, then run out to buy a condo of their own.

But there is a more important reason for these books than this conventional sort of advertising or soft promotion. One reason these real estate books are literally heavy — some weigh in at two kilos and more — is that they are place-holders while purchasers wait up to two or three years to occupy the condos they have purchased.

Such is the psychology of delayed gratification that purchasers want something, anything, to show off their homes-to-be to themselves and friends. The Vancouver-developed, but now continent-wide pattern of pre-selling real estate before construction even commences ensures there are long, long waits between writing that deposit cheque and moving in. Eye candy and gourmet appetizers both, real estate books manage this hunger long before purchasers partake of a first meal in their own new dining rooms. Because of the emotional and intellectual connections they propose, these books may even recover their significant costs by reducing "churn."

This is where purchasers re-sell their units even before occupying them.

Typical of the new real estate books, the two hardbound volumes presented in an oversize case for Victoria's Bayview development have pages so thick that project architect Paul Merrick might have fashioned his architectural models out of them. Bayview is 128 condos in an 11-storey tower and adjacent townhouses now rising on the hilly centre of Songhees Point in Victoria's harbour, the first major B.C. project for successful Calgary developers Ken and Patricia Mariash.

With gold foil-stamped titles, Bayview's deluxe presentation book confounds the assertion of its own cover: "True luxury need not boast." In similar fashion, the bound volume ends with an Andy Warhol quote — "Land really is the best art" — set alone like a proverb on an all-black sheet.

Like many of these books, the Bayview volume threatens the livelihoods of independent architecture critics like me by reviewing their own buildings. "An outstanding architectural accomplishment that redefines luxurious living," the book asserts, going on to laud the master-planned community as, "unsurpassed for its vision and design."

The second Bayview volume may be more important to purchasers than the first, offering 38 large pages featuring a condo floor plan on each. With layouts so splendidly presented, it is little wonder that purchasers, with real estate books in hand, start to brag about "their" architect, and "my" custom plan.

Vancouver condo mega-marketer Bob Rennie was a pioneer and now a key exponent of books for the highest of high-end coastal properties. He has produced them for a string of prominent projects for Westbank Corporation, including the Shaw Tower, Fairmont and Shangri-La projects. Each of these books is a more spectacular publication than the previous. Mr. Rennie says they are an excellent marketing investment because, "they are a validation of your purchase."

For his marketing of downtown Vancouver's Jameson tower, Bob Rennie produced a modest (by the real estate publishing standards he helped establish) 16-page colour brochure, but then gave everyone on his VIP buyers' list a copy of the latest London-published monograph on the collected works of its architect, Sir Norman Foster. The promotion put more architecture books on Vancouver coffee tables than the total local sales of fine recent books on the Patkaus and Richard and Gregory Henriquez. But Mr. Rennie feels the giveaway helped build the brand of the project: "Buyers become who they associate with, and books like these help educate them," he says.

Building the brand of a famous architect was also part of Rennie Marketing System's book set for West Vancouver's Water's Edge, now under construction. With condos ranging in price from $730,000 to $3.2-million, this project's book begins and ends with signed freehand sketches on parchment by Yale University Dean of Architecture and project architect, Robert Stern, who is also a high-profile architectural historian and exponent of building-quoting postmodernism.

On the pages inside, one can almost hear the brochure-writer's pens scratching notes from one of Professor Stern's richly allusive slide lectures: "Serenely poised, respecting the splendour of nature on the West Coast while paying homage to the timeless beauty of London's Regent Park and Bath's Royal Crescent, this is Water's Edge."

While proposing this may irk our many fine novelists, poets and belle-lettrists, real estate books like these may well be the literature that best captures the values and aspirations of British Columbians today.