Got to hurry on back to my hotel room, Where I've got me a date with Botticelli's niece. She promised that she'd be right there with me When I paint my masterpiece.

My writing about some of the more notable and quirky art and photography books out there this holiday season will never be misconstrued as a masterpiece, but Bob Dylan’s music-meld of art and commerce wherein he’s “Sailin' 'round the world in a dirty gondola / Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!” got me to thinking of appropriate songs for some of the books I stumbled upon. Well, that, and plus the fact that I had the headphones on and a whole lot of CDs and LPs within inspiration’s reach.

Monkey Portraits by Jill Greenberg, Paul Weitz

Feeling a bit anthropomorphic lately? You would’ve thought Chuck Berry said it all:

Blond haired, good lookin' - tryin' to get me hooked.
Want me to marry - settle down - get a home - write a book!
Too much monkey business. Too much monkey business.
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in!

But with 76 emotion-ranging photos, Jill Greenberg displays some surprising images of monkeys and apes, many of whom have appeared on film or in television shows. Maybe she found them more disciplined than the Hollywood celebrities she used to photograph for major publications.

My Secret: A PostSecret Book by Frank Warren

As the Beatles once implored:

Listen,
Do you want to know a secret?
Do you promise not to tell, whoa oh, oh.

Closer,
Let me whisper in your ear…

Or just mail them to Warren for this follow-up to the bestseller, PostSecret, his 2005 exercise in community art in which strangers mailed him anonymous postcards with their innermost secrets. This time around Warren has personally selected never-before-seen anonymous postcards created by teens and college students from across America with such hilarious and off-the-wall messages as:

• "My friends think I was homeschooled. I spent high school in juvi."
• "I am avoiding you because you are socially below me."
• "I know the truth to the lie my parents tell... "
   

A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 by Annie Leibovitz

The Kinks once sang:

People take pictures of the Summer,
Just in case someone thought they had missed it,
Just to proved that it really existed.
People take pictures of each other,
And the moment to last them for ever,
Of the time when they mattered to someone.

Many photographers have taken pictures of the celebrities and scenes documented by Leibowitz in her career with Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. With shots of such famed figures as Johnny Cash, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Keith Richards, Michael Jordan, Joan Didion, R2-D2, Patti Smith, Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, William Burroughs, and George W. Bush; and scenes from the siege of Sarajevo in the early '90s, and distinctive landscapes and ad campaigns — many collected in this volume — Leibowitz brings her own style to “the moment to last… forever.”

The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe

Ray Davies also sang as an “Art Lover”:

Pretty little legs, I want to draw them,
Like a Degas ballerina.
Pure white skin, like porcelain,
She’s a work of art and I should know
I’m an art lover.