I like the idea of giving big books for Christmas — big glossy books seem slightly extravagant, something you might not buy for yourself very often, but would be happy once you owned it. DK books make some of the best “big books” on the market, and I often can’t help but flip through them when we get a DK order in. And this last time, after flipping through them, I decided I had to take a couple of them home with me. I think either would make a great Christmas gift.
My wife and I became first-time homeowners a year ago, and since then I’ve started collecting books about home repair and home improvement (it’s slightly cheaper and infinitely easier to buy books about a subject than to actually do that thing). What I’ve found is that pretty much all the books cover about 90% of the same material, but each book will have something unique — maybe a topic that isn’t covered in the other books, or a set of instructions that are slightly more in depth than the other books, or even just a single photograph or illustration that saves the day when you are well past the point of no return in a repair or project.
DK’s Do It Yourself: Home Improvement is one of the best guides I’ve seen. Every repair or project has full-color photographs for every step in the process. Materials, tools, construction…everything is laid out with clear, concise descriptions and instructions. Whether you need your first home improvement guide, or just want to add another to your library, this is a great choice.
The title on the cover reads Natural History, but it’s the subtitle that gives it away: “The Ultimate Visual Guide to Everything on Earth”. Rocks and minerals, bacteria, plant life, and the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom is contained in this book, with sharp full-color photos and descriptions. This is the kind of book that I would flip through for hours as a kid, though I don’t remember any books that looked this good or were this complete. I bought this as a Christmas present for my intensely inquisitive nephew (nobody tell him!), and my hope is that he will find a lot of answers and a lot of new questions in this book.
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