If you’re looking for a great gift book for the holiday season, Jessica Helfand‘s Scrapbooks: An American History may be your answer. The New York Times recently called the volume the best gift book of the year, praising its stunning, evocative visuals that “work to bring the world into our hands in such a way that text is, largely, superfluous.” Filled with memorable artifacts as diverse as pressed flowers, telegrams, and locks of hair, Scrapbooks offers its readers a rare glimpse into America’s vibrant past through the lens of a “virtually unexplored visual vernacular, a world of makeshift means and primitive methods, of gestural madness and unruly visions, of piety and poetry and a million private plagiarisms.”

To find out more about Scrapbooks, visit the YUP website or check out the author’s videos on Amazon.com.