There are lots of sparkly decorations about in the art world this season. For a start you can unpack the treasures from Tutankh-amun's tomb as spread after glittering spread unfurls in the sumptuous new picture book produced by the showman-archaeologist Zahi Hawass to accompany this season's most-hyped exhibition (King Tutankhamun: The Treasures of the Tomb, Thames & Hudson, £39.95/offer £35.95).

“Everywhere, the glint of gold,” as Howard Carter declared. The same could be said of the monumental new volume Klimt (Prestel, £89/£80.10). A key piece of scholarship by Alfred Weidenger (curator of the Belvedere in Vienna), it brings readers up to date with new discoveries and research. But its large-scale format also captures the decorative glory of Gustav Klimt's lavish surfaces — not least the glimmering sensuality of his gold works.

More coruscating ornaments are displayed in Poul Beckmann's Living Jewels 2 (Prestel, £4.50/£4.28). Science and art meet in these magnificent, hugely magnified photographs of some of the world's most exotic beetles. A scuttling bug looks far more fabulous than any Fabergé egg. If natural beauty inspires you, the profusely illustrated catalogue to one of this year's most wonderful shows will be a delight. Amazing Rare Things (Royal Collection Publications, £18.95/£17.06), a selection of fascinating essays introduced by David Attenborough who curated the exhibition, tells of the voyages of discovery that brought artistically inclined naturalists face to face for the first time with some of the planet's most exotic and lovely creations.

Exoticism of an earthier sort is examined from every position in Seduced (Merrell, £29.95/£26.96), the explicitly illustrated, though scholarly book that accompanies the Barbican exhibition celebrating the relationship between “art and sex from antiquity until now”.

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BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas choice: fiction

• The Times Christmas choice: crime

• The Times Christmas choice: history

• The Times Christmas choice: audiobooks

BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas choice: children aged 2-10

• The Times Christmas choice: gardening

• The Times Christmas choice: art

• The Times Christmas choice: memoirs and autobiographies

• The Times Christmas choice: graphic novels

From Ancient Roman lusts, through Turkish temptations and Turner's erotic daydreams to the kitsch porno-fantasies of Jeff Koons, it ranges across cultures and sexual proclivities. This is a present best not unwrapped in front of the family.

Your maiden aunt may feel safer with The Society Portrait (Thames & Hudson, £35/£31.50) which sweeps the reader portrait by portrait through the social scene of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Amid the rustle of satin and the whisper of delightful anecdotes, you can meet anyone from the first Earl of Leicester to the Majarajah of Indore. Never have so many haughty profiles been lifted, so many elegant lovelies collapsed on to sofas, so many smiles frozen on so many frigid lips.

The art biography of the year is, without doubt, the third volume of John Richardson's continuing The Life of Picasso (Cape, £30/£27). Dealing with 1917 to 1932, this long awaited book — subtitled The Triumphant Years — finds the great modernist pushing his incredible talents and the tolerance of his new ballerina wife to their limits. No one knows more than Richardson about the protean Picasso and this definitive volume, like its predecessors, enriches a thorough and authoritative account of the life with vivid anecdotes and intimate details that reveal the real man behind the facade.

The huge 30,000 Years of Art (Phaidon, £29.95/£26.96) is surely a bargain at just under £1 for each thousand years of world culture. Big shiny picture by big shiny picture, it flips you through the decades, down the centuries and through the millennia comparing art works from a global range of cultures. This has delightful curiosity value — when Leonardo was painting his first realistic portraits, the Arawak people of the Dominican Republic were making ironwood pipes for inhaling hallucinogens. This is a delightfully fresh, if not particularly informative way of looking at art. For a more purposeful and academically rigorous picture of global culture look at Julian Bell's Mirror of the World (Thames & Hudson, £24.95/£22.50) which disregards chronology to make some enlightening comparisons. A Chinese scroll and a paparazzi photograph may have more in common than you think.

One of the most fascinating books of the year is The Writer's Brush (Mid-List Press, £25/£22.50). Donald Friedman has trawled the literary canon for writers who were also visual artists. He stumbles on an amazing range, including no fewer than 13 Nobel laureates. Here are the bright watercolour landscapes that Hermann Hesse credited with saving his life, the scratchy primal scribbles of Franz Kafka and the serene oil paintings of e e cummings. The instinct to create, it seems, comes before the form.

Bestsellers 2007

1. Wall and Piece by Banksy
Century, £20 hardcover, £12.99 paperback
Collection of images by the elusive graffiti artist whose work has gone from the street to the walls of Sotheby's.

2. Hogarth by Mark Hallett and Christine Riding
Tate Publishing, £29.99

3. Manet to Picasso by Christopher Riopelle, Charlotte Appleyard, Sarah Herring, Nancy Ireson, Anne Robbins
National Gallery, £9.95

4. Gilbert and George by Jan Debbaut, Michael Bracewell and Marco Livingston
Tate Publishing, £12.99

5. BP Portrait Award by Lynne Truss
National Portrait Gallery, £8.50

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