Another, more recently venerated figure, Richard Avedon, assembles a collection of portraits of (mostly famous) figures from The Sixties (Cape, pounds 40). A representative selection from the full range of his output – from the radically innovative, semi-abstract work of 1916 to the impersonal realism of his later work – is showcased in Paul Strand: sixty years of photographs (Aperture, pounds 22). Having benefited from Stieglitz’s encouragement and advocacy, Paul Strand went on to become an acknowledged master in his own right. More than anyone else, it was Alfred Stieglitz who established photography as an art in America. His achievement, as photographer and passionate advocate of his medium, is gloriously displayed in a monograph (Bullfinch, pounds 50) which immediately establishes itself as the best available edition of his work.Stieglitz claimed that “the quality of touch in its deepest living sense” was inherent in his photographs; they are reproduced here with tactile fidelity and care.

Brown’s as-if-faded colours are reminiscent of Richard Misrach’s desert scenes; certainly he takes his place alongside Misrach as one of the pre-eminent photographers of the American landscape.The larger history of American photography in all its canonical richness is thoroughly surveyed in a revised and enlarged edition of An American Century of Photography (Abrams, pounds 60). Carleton Watkins: the art of perception (Abrams, pounds 40) is exemplary, both in quality of reproduction and in its scholarly situating of Watkins in a tradition he virtually initiated.More than a century later, Peter Brown, in On the Plains (Norton, pounds 25), transforms the ostensibly featureless expanse of the great plains of the American West into an infinitely varied photographic space subtly inscribed with memory and history. Benefiting, in the mid-1860s, from the patronage of the California State Geological survey, Carleton Watkins took some of the defining views of Yosemite and established a specifically American vision of the sublime, an epic wilderness untouched by – and to be protected from – man. Digitally enhanced, the photos have a stark, grey clarity and the book’s overall design – unnumbered pages induce a kind of narrative weightlessness – aims to simulate the experience and environment depicted.
If the moon landing was, in some ways, the climactic expression of US expansionist ideology, that is nicely suggested by compositional echoes of pictures from the dawn of American landscape photography – when the likes of Timothy O’Sullivan were employed by the great geological surveys aiming to map the nation’s manifest destiny of westward expansion. A similar photo – of Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint – is one of the better known images in Full Moon (Cape, pounds 35), Michael Light’s selection from the massive haul of pictures generated by the Apollo missions.

Showing bloody boot-prints in the snow of Chechnya, it offers a darkly contrasting view of the potential for progress suggested by another famous footprint: Neil Armstrong’s on the Moon, in 1969. A picture by Paul Lowe from 1994 or 1995 (depending on which caption you believe) is reproduced in both books. Photographers from Magnum are well-represented, but any tendency to associate the agency nostalgically with the legendary heyday of Robert Capa is vehemently corrected by Magnum0 (Phaidon, pounds 39.95), a strikingly packaged portfolio of the finest photojournalism of the past ten years. Editor Bruce Bernard’s captions are often intrusively banal – if a picture isn’t “memorable”, “classic”, “timeless” or “telling”, what is it doing here? – but that is a negative testament to the narrative power of the images he has assembled. Biggest and best of many rival volumes offering a visual chronicle of the century is Phaidon’s eponymous Century (pounds 29.95).

A companion to his volume on The Ivy (another celeb-packed London restaurant), it achieves the remarkable feat of being even worse. The book includes a clutch of unfeasible recipes – fried egg with foie gras and ceps, risotto cooked in champagne with Perigord truffles – along with Gill’s tedious pontifications (“etiquette is deadly serious, with a deadly serious purpose.”), but mostly it is photos Lots of elaborately arranged food, lots of high heels The ultimate in gastro-porn.. In case you’re glutted with sweetness, the book ends with a classic Bordelaise recipe for lamprey in chocolate sauce: “Take a live lamprey, bleed it and reserve the blood for the sauce.”Le Caprice by A A Gill (Hodder, pounds 25) is the joker in the pack. Not until page 98 does Jayne-Stanes get down to recipes, ranging from Black Forest gateau, that old war-horse of the dessert trolley, to Sachertorte (subject of a famous lawsuit in the Fifties).She is diffident about Death by Chocolate (“Personally, I don’t like any reference, be it recipe or not which indicates that chocolate is a sinner”).

Also, some of the recipes have been insufficiently anglicised.Chocolate: The Definitive Guide by Sara Jayne-Stanes (Grub Street, pounds 20) is precisely what it claims. This glossy production includes an 80-page history of chocolate – the word xoco-atl meant bitter-water in 10th-century Mexico. Sauteed rocket, garlic and anchovies on polenta sounds like a stunning starter. One warning: you need to be in striking distance of a good ethnic grocer for many ingredients. But vegetables do get star billing, in particular Swiss chard (the Med’s most popular vegetable, says Wolfert) and polenta. We don’t really need to know that Aicha Rouatri is “a smiling, sunny Tunisian widow with a well-lined face”, but her recipe for semolina bread sounds excellent. Despite its title, the book is far from being solely vegetarian, with recipes ranging from black rice with mussels (the blackness comes not from squid ink but an onion and chilli “jam”) to “lamb stew smothered with cactus”.