On Thursday your search for the ultimate coffee-table book is over. The Mug arrives. It's a 750-page Valentine, a provocative illuminated manuscript for the postmodern pilgrim. This hardbound book by the sculptor and artist Sarah Lucas and her partner-collaborator, the artist and poet Olivier Garbay, is in the form of a not-for-children alphabet book, starting with A. My favourite entry may be X, but only when read in context. You can dip and choose from entries, but it's reading the whole shebang that delivers the maximum impact.

Colour photographs of Lucas's and Garbay's art pieces, snapshots and portraits weave in and out among poems and sardonic wordplay. Modelled on William Blake's illustrated books and S.Foster Damon's A Blake Dictionary, The Mug traces a path through innocence and experience, sex and semaphore, mysticism and the mundane. But Lucas and Garbay tweak the search for illumination by turning angels into stuffed objects (“the doll that doesn't disappoint,” as Lucas calls it), bending genders, jive talking and adding sexual shivers to high chivalry. The Mug is a compendium of two minds in sync. This tête-à-tête of four years highlights the summer of 2007, when the two travelled across Europe together in the service of their various exhibitions - Rome, Zurich, Hamburg, Paris, Liverpool, Barcelona, New York.

The Mug is not cheap, but it is value for money. You won't get a Damien Hirst into your living room for £150, let alone a Lucas, who sold her Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs to Charles Saatchi for a record £52,875 in 1996, the highest price of any contemporary artist at the time.

A weighty red hardback, The Mug has a picture of a coffee mug on its front cover. On the back is a photo of a Lucas sculpture, tights stuffed with fabric, a metal clip at the top, a stuffed penis, testicles and all. And that's just the outside.

Lucas once made and sold real mugs with Tracey Emin at The Shop, which they ran together for six months. At the most recent Art Car Boot Fair, Lucas and Garbay sold their own limited-edition mugs - as well as cigarette jewellery. (Lucas is known for her use of cigarettes to make certain sculptures.)

But a mug is a face, as well. There's a lot of portraiture in this book. “Olivier took the photographs, unless he's in them, then I took them, unless we're both in them...” Lucas says.

Mug - the mouth. Lots of kissing, sucking, blowing, sipping in this sensual book. Lots of beautiful goofs on genitals, as is Lucas's trademark. (“Sarah owns sex,” Garbay says.)

Mug up - to revise, learn. You're going to learn about the gods, constellations, symbols, chivalry, alchemy, artists they like such as Jarman, Bernini, Gluck, Ted Hughes, Dalí... You're going to see and read things that might even liberate pieces of soul-memory.

Mug - an assault! There's violence in here in the service of passion. Stop war! Make love!

Muggin' - staring in an impertinent way. I suggest you do that with The Mug. Dive between the covers. Lose yourself in puns and playfulness, lust and lustre. Lucas and Garbay tapped into the same vein that T.S. Eliot uses in The Wasteland, ancient references combined with modern slang - a secret language to turn on the code-breaker in you. There are even French phrases that are mercifully not impenetrable. (“The spine of The Mug is the same size as my French/English dictionary,” Garbay says.)

Mug - make exaggerated grimaces for humorous effect. The mug-shots, cross-referencing, sexual slang, visual puns are fun. An up-to-date landscape of love, loss, sex, ebullience and the search for the sacred.

Lucas graduated from Goldsmiths to become one of the premiere Young British Artists emerging in the 1990s, a group including Hirst and Emin. The Mug is published by Hirst's publishing company, Other Criteria. Lucas's works slyly juxtapose tabloid culture and high art to shake up notions of gender and beauty. Buckets and melons, fried eggs and army boots, bureaus with chickens and mattresses with lightbulbs articulate the surfaces and depths of the sexualised human body. From the quirky photos of herself to the graceful plaster casts of her recent Penetralia show, Lucas has staked her claim securely in once male-dominated territory.

Garbay's refined and prolific works as a poet (The Cloud), woodcut artist, printmaker and photographer explore classical allusions, intimations of immortality and the romance of romance. The two met as artists in the Hamsterwheel exhibit in Hamburg, when the Austrian sculptor Franz West put together a travelling circus of top artists to tour Europe and New York. (“One day the circus ran away to join me,” Lucas says.) Later Garbay and Lucas collaborated on God is Dad, an exhibit and book.

On a recent February Day of Apollo in St John's Restaurant, my wife Elise and I raise mugs with Lucas and Garbay. Despite their arty pedigrees, they are convivial, unpretentious, engaging and generous. Garbay talks - in French, in English, in leaps and bounds. Lucas talks, too, and grins and wiggles her orange-wellied toes. The two of them clearly love each other, grabbing opportunities to embrace with the joy of reunion. (Lucas lives in Suffolk much of the time; Garbay makes London his base.) I feel the weird spontaneous urge to embrace them myself. They are in full possession of their own talents and visions, and profligate with good feelings. This is what artists should be like. Audacious, magical, conspiratorial, fearless.

The conversation at table resembles the verbal wizardry that you'll find in The Mug. You as the participant fill in the gaps with your own references. Garbay would call it “catching the sleeve of life as she turns away”. Here are some random quotes from the afternoon, moments of connection that would each take a volume to elucidate, but which perfectly capture the true essence of the book. “Ask me a real question.” “Love is a bird, is a burden.” “My middle name is Elizabeth.” “Wakey, wakey, tea and cakey.” “Our fathers went to wars.” “I might buy a pub - I'm generally well-disposed towards people.” “Do what you like - not what you want.” “It's good to have a wheelbarrow.” “I'd like to surrender.” “A purely poor sod.” “The sea was rough, but laughable, according to my mum.” “He says he's an accountant.” “Tell me about your impatience.” Having lunch with them is like celebrating with Hansel and Gretel that the evil witch has been shoved into the oven.

The story goes that Matisse was the only contemporary painter whose canvases Picasso didn't paint over, after buying them. Picasso discovered in Matisse that rarity - a kindred spirit. Lucas and Garbay have found in each other the same.

The Mug by Sarah Lucas and Olivier Garbay is published by Other Criteria/ White Cube (www.othercriteria.com)

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010