Coffee-table books of particular interest to people in our area are as numerous as ever, and some of them are quite splendid. Here’s a local shopping list:

Richard Benjamin, a former staff photographer at the Journal, is one of the most consistent producers. This year his subject is at the doorsteps of many of us, and within an hour’s drive of nearly all: NARRAGANSETT BAY (Commonwealth Editions, 128 pages, $27.95). The text is by John Torgan of Providence, who has served as Narragansett Baykeeper since 1994. Benjamin’s images, in great demand by calendar makers, are wordless love letters. Nearly all of them are of familiar scenes, yet rendered in a new light, from a fresh angle, an undiscovered vantage point. In his case, familiarity breeds contentment.

Nantucket is a nearly irresistible subject, and there’s not much point in resisting anyway, not when you can get the whole thing between covers for a mere $40. NANTUCKET: Island Living (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 223 pages) by Leslie Linsley, photographs by Terry Pommett, takes us to the island’s remaining natural scenic areas, through its history, inside its houses, even into some of its folkways. And when you’re done looking, you don’t have to stand in line for the ferry.

A little farther afield, or ashore, we reach CAPE COD (Houghton Mifflin, 255 pages, $35), with photographs by Scot Miller. Unlike most coffee-table books, the text dominates here — but the words are by Henry David Thoreau, so there’s no cause for complaint. In bringing out an illustrated edition of Thoreau’s 1865 classic, the editors have, perhaps inadvertently, set up a competition: Can the writer or the photographer make us see the Cape more vividly? Miller is up to the challenge. The winner is the reader.

SUMMER BY THE SEASIDE: The Architecture of New England Coastal Resort Hotels, 1820-1950, by Bryant F. Tolles Jr. (University Press of New England, 256 pages, $50) takes us from the shore areas of Connecticut to Maine in a largely retrospective look at the great resort hotels. Rhode Island had an astonishing number of them, on Block Island, in Watch Hill, and along the Bay. They’re nearly all gone now, swept away by hurricane winds and two even more irresistible forces: egalitarianism and the progressive income tax.

Enough of this shoreside dalliance; it’s getting cold now, time to repair to our homes and libraries. It turns out Rhode Island has two of the 16 largest membership libraries in the country — the Providence Athenaeum (1836) and the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport (1747), America’s oldest. In AMERICA’S MEMBERSHIP LIBRARIES (Oak Knoll Press, 354 pages, unpriced), edited by Richard Wendorf, director of the Boston Athenaeum, each gets its considerable due. In essays by their directors, Alison Maxell and Cheryl Helms, respectively, and in the richness of the photographs from various sources, we get a sense of the intellectual refinement and grace of earlier generations of Rhode Islanders, and the comfort of knowing it is still available to all in at least two places.

Another Newport institution worthy of note is The National Museum of American Illustration on Bellevue Avenue, established and operated by Laurence S. and Judy Goffman Cutler. This husband-and-wife team has just published a lavishly illustrated and handsomely printed volume on the life and work of one of America’s most prolific illustrators from the Golden Age of illustration, J.C. Leyendecker. Norman Rockwell’s name may be more familiar, but you’ll recognize Leyendecker’s work. Rockwell himself called him the “Master of the Magazine Cover,” and modeled his own career on Leyendecker’s. Gaze at any of the 600 images within J.C. LEYENDECKER (Abrams, 256 pages, $50) and you’ll understand why.

GREAT HOUSES OF NEW ENGLAND (Rizzoli, 272 pages, $55), by Roderic H. Blackburn with photography by Geoffrey Gross, has one of the most inviting covers I’ve seen all year. I wish, like Alice with her looking glass, I could step through the dust jacket and walk right up and ring the bell of that sun-daubed house by the sea. It turns out to be “Beauport,” the Sleeper-McCann House in Gloucester, Mass., and there are 18 others just as attractive and as lovingly photographed inside. Two of them are owned by the Preservation Society of Newport County: Rosecliff and the Isaac Bell Jr. House. Blackburn is an ethnologist and architectural historian who has held positions as research director at Historic Cherry Hill, assistant director of the Albany Institute of History

and Art, and senior research fellow at the New York State Museum. Gross is just a great photographer.